A new login technique is becoming available in 2023: the passkey. The passkey promises to solve phishing and prevent password reuse. But lots of smart and security-oriented folks are confused about what exactly a passkey is. There’s a good reason for that. A passkey is in some sense one of two (or three) different things, depending on how it’s stored.
But does their advantage in security overcome the fact that they’re a much larger target?
It’s similar to how money under a pillow could be safer than money in the bank; depending on who you are.
In general, yes. Big sites get hacked all the time. Passwords from those sites get cracked all the time. Anyone who uses the same password on multiple sites is almost guaranteed to have that password stolen and associated with a username/email at some point, which goes on a list to try on banks, paypal, etc.
Conversely, to my knowledge, there has been one major security breach at a password manager, LastPass, and the thieves got more-or-less useless encrypted passwords. The only casualty, at least known so far, is people who used Lastpass to store crypto wallet seed phrases in plaintext, who signed up before 2018 when the more secure master password requirements were put in effect, chose an insecure master password, and never changed it once in the four years prior to the breach.
It’s not perfect, but the record is lightyears better.
Put it this way: Without a password manager, you’re gambling that zero sites, out of every single site you sign on to, ever gets hacked. From facebook, google, netflix, paypal, your bank, your lemmy or mastodon instances, all the way down to the funny little mom-n-pop hobby fansite you signed up for 20 years ago that hasn’t updated their password hashing functions since they opened it. With a password manager, you’re gambling that that one site doesn’t get hacked, a site whose sole job is not to get hacked and to stay on the forefront of security.
(Also, you don’t even have to use their central servers; services like BitWarden let you keep your password record locally if you prefer, so with a bit of setup, the gamble becomes zero sites)
I use a different password for every site tho. Using same pw for every site, that’s another extreme entirely.
Most people do not. The average user has one or two passwords, and maybe swaps out letters for numbers when the site forces them to. Because remembering dozens of passwords is hard. If you, personally, can remember dozens of secure passwords, you’re some kind of prodigy and the use-case for a password manager doesn’t apply to you, but it still applies to the majority.
One doesn’t have to remember dozens. Just a basic algorithm for deriving it from the name of the site. Complex enough that it’s not obvious looking at a couple passwords but easy to remember.
This method works for me. I understand its dangers (can still correlate. Dozen passwords and figure out the algo). But it’s my current approach. I hate even discussing it since obscurity helps.
Your system is most likely way less secure than you think. I mean, possibly not since you’re here, but most schemes are trivial to solve even automatically.
…and that doesn’t really matter either, because so many people have such shitty passwords (and use the same ones everywhere) that noone really bothers checking for permutations when they have thousands of valid accounts.
But if truly enough people are convinced to be more secure your scheme may eventually become a target, too.
With passkeys (and password managers in general) the security gets so good that the vast majority of current attacks on passeord protection get obsolete.
I agree 100%. As mentioned, I rarely share my approach and I’ll be deleting that comment in a bit. It works well for me.
No hacker is attempting to decode the password algorithm because they don’t know of its existence on my logins, and they have thousands of better ways to go - as you said.
Okay, I’m glad you have a system, but it’s not really relevant? I didn’t say you should use a password manager. I said it’s good for the majority of people who can only remember one or two passwords.
I’m of the mindset that locally stored keys and/or social solutions are better than throwing all passwords in a single place.
All passwords for large amounts of people in a single place is begging for a break-in.
I spend a lot of time studying solutions in this space as I’m a long time crypto solutions dev. Lots of ideas and discussions to be had.
I’m not disagreeing with you, just having a dialogue.
That’s probably true, but perfect can’t be the enemy of good. Getting everyone who currently uses the worst method (a single global password) to use a better method means that better method has to be easier than that, and as things lie right now, most security researchers agree that the method most likely to succeed is removing roadblocks, both client-side and server-side, to make password mangers even easier and more secure (whether you want to store it locally or not is really up to you, and again, it is already an option). We’re not talking about people who already try to stay secure, or care about the exact details. You and I already know we care about security and do our best, presumably. The crucial thing is to onramp Bob Q. Public, the middle manager whose password on everything is
rover73because he loves his dog, and any solution more complicated than remembering one password and clicking one button is going to be too much change for him to get around to doing itOnboarding new users securely is in the forefront of most minds in my industry because the current standard is a 12 word phrase written on paper, which most users throw in a cloud solution or screenshot.
The stakes are even higher in crypto where you’re protecting, without recourse, large sums of value. Passkeys are a critically needed solution for my industry. But they need coupled with a social or offline storage recovery mechanism.