This is exactly where passkeys go too far. "to keep their accounts safe" is always the excuse used to reduce the freedoms of users. Web sites have no business deciding how things are handled on user devices but it's precisely what passkeys enable. The boundary of control of a website used to stop at the interface between the site and the user. Now that boundary will extend to the devices. The idea of property and ownership is attacked again. The device is not something the user owns and has full control over but something that is a gateway to access content controlled by the big Internet companies.

Knowing this, how long until Netflix, Disney other content providers (sorry I don't know which ones are popular right now) demand use of a passkey originating form a device with a Trusted Platform (aka Untrusted User) Module ? This is part of a long plan initiated years ago with Windows TPM requirements, Microsoft account requirements. The gap between closed and open platforms will widen and the path is clearly to apply the Smartphone model where everything is closed, controlled, DRM'd, to other computers. We're lucky the IBM PC architecture was an open one but the war on that is on.

There is no reason a passkey can’t be portable - even the so called “device bound” credentials these vendors are claiming prevent export are actually implemented as credentials synchronised throughout their own ecosystems - i.e multi device.

NOTHING in the FIDO2/WebAuthn spec forbids user controlled portability.

It’s just bigtech trying to make it harder to leave their ecosystems - and when passkeys become widely adopted you won’t be able to log into those sites/apps without some form of recovery on a case by case basis should you decide to switch from Apple to android, windows to Mac, etc.

>Device loss scenarios

>Users are largely unsure about the implications for their passkeys if they lose or break their device, as it seems their device holds the entire capability to authenticate. To trust passkeys as a replacement for the password, users need to be prepared and know what to do in the event of losing one – or all – of their devices.

>Backing up and synchronising passkeys with a Credential Manager makes it easier to recover access to them compared to other existing second factor options. However, this relies on the user having prepared their Credential Manager account for recovery. Users need help in understanding and implementing the right steps so they can feel ready to go passwordless and use passkeys without extra worry and hassle.

Nice read https://techrights.org/n/2025/05/02/Passkeys_Are_Vendor_Lock...

I read about Passkey comittee being against open source passkey managers during start of this year (can't reference it, sorry) but with open source password/key managers already supporting passkeys, i don't think it turned out to be true.

But afaik you still can't move Passkeys from Chrome or Safari to any other credential manager.

I was vaguely under the impression that there was a ton of push-back again import/export flows in general, that the CEP was going to be the only supported path. And it requires that your Credentials Manager have a public endpoint to send your credentials to. Which doesn't force but radically ups the challenge for individuals to self host or manage things themselves, will drive Passkeys to remain service provided only.

With governments upping their right to snoop, immoral intercept, it's hard to have too much hope that Passkeys can remain trustable & respectable. If the UK passes a law saying they can access all your keys, the odds are not in your favor that Google is going to make a Signal like stand & tell the UK to buzz off. It's unfortunate that these giant massive enterprises are so big are so many products all in one, because if there was a healthy Chrome business not tied to thousands of other profit lines, maybe Chrome would dare have some backbone & tell their majesty to go stick it where the sun don't shine. But these companies are so big that even the most immoral outrageous ridiculous laws end up being accepted. Passkeys seems like a huge painted target; maybe the next 15-20 years go by with no one trying to get in the cookie jar, but it seems inevitable that the moral rot and illegitimacy of governments will stoop down to making this good idea untenable & a joke, in a long enough time scale. Especially with the service-provider-only ecosystem that's being engineered and imposed here.

> Backing up and synchronising passkeys with a Credential Manager makes it easier to recover access to them compared to other existing second factor options. However, this relies on the user having prepared their Credential Manager account for recovery. Users need help in understanding and implementing the right steps so they can feel ready to go passwordless and use passkeys without extra worry and hassle.

The benefit to the user of a passkey is that they don't have to remember passwords ("what you have" and not "what you know"). But if you lose what you have, you're screwed. There's no straightforward way to mitigate this.

Proposed solutions I've seen just add an extra layer of "what you know," but this just changes the security back to "what you know" if it supersedes the passkey.

For example, my family has had to call me for help on the interaction between passkeys on Apple & Amazon multiple times. They have a shared Amazon account, which neither Amazon nor Apple seem to like. The first problem came when they didn't even know they'd been moved to passkeys - there was a popup that one of them didn't understand, they clicked OK to get it to go away, and suddenly the other partner can't log in, and neither of them can figure out how to log into Prime Video on their AppleTV. Another time one of them got "nudged" to add a fingerprint to the account, again freezing out the other person.

Until that nonsense stops happening, Passkeys aren't ready.

Google does not care about FIDO or standards compliance. They care about vendor lock-in their proprietary passkey offerings allow.

To expand on that a bit, I don't have a problem with banks or whoever insisting they be stored securely. That means I don't have a problem win the inference that they don't trust me to store or even see my own keys.

What I do have a problem with is not being able to back them up. Which means I have a problem with Apple, Google or even Bitwarden handing me out a free they can take away at any time.

Fix that, so I can have store my identity(ies) at multiple providers, and I happy.

* Improving OS flows. Every passkey implementer that's also an OS gets really excited about enrolling you into their proprietary clouds, and using alternate flows to respect the users wish to use their own manager is usually hidden in confusing UI forms that don't feel consistent if you don't already know what you're doing.

* Device loss scenario is already mentioned, although more broadly speaking a lot of the reasons people get leery is because all three major providers (Google, Microsoft, Apple) are notorious for their near black box technical support. Losing access to one of these providers on its own is already enough to heavily disrupt the average person's life. Having your login details stored with them makes this even worse.

* The FIDO Alliance Is Way Too Excited About Device Attestation And I Don't Like It. Basically the FIDO Alliance's behavior around passkeys reeks of security theater and them badgering an open source password manager for daring to let users export their passkeys in the format they preferred, rather than what the FIDO Alliance wanted (which is that passkeys must always be encrypted with a password) is telling. If they are as secure as promised, it's a bad look to start threatening device attestation as a means to get people to comply with your specific idea of security. The only real barrier right now to it outright being a thing is that Apple zeroes out the field and when Apple is the only meaningful halt to that kind of attestation, something has gone very wrong.

I think passkeys are interesting, but I just flat out don't trust the FIDO Alliance with the idea. They're way too invested in big tech being good stewards of the ecosystem, which is becoming increasingly unpalatable as more and more evidence piles up that they're really bad actors on everything else. (So why should we trust them with our credentials?) The idea genuinely has value (it's literally the same kind of mechanism as SSH keys), but the hostility towards user freedom is deeply concerning and a blocker to getting people to use it. Even non-technical people seem leery of them, just because of how aggressively big tech has been pushing it.

Since then though it’s rare I’ve run into issues like that, and the login flow is much better in sites that have adopted it. I did hit an issue in GitHub last week where after logging into things with passkey it then immediately wanted me to MFA which could use the same passkey. But these things are getting rarer.

And why can't we have the use of such keys enforced by an EU legislation so that all businesses allow users to login using such strings of random characters?

The world would then be a better place.

Device attestation and signing transparency logs are quite necessary for users to have visibility of where/when Passkeys have logged in. Really they should also have key ratcheting so stolen keys become useless.