If the user deletes passwords they're shown the same exact message. The only saving grace for passwords is that you can remember them, but are you also suggesting to not use generated passwords?
This is why I haven't started using passkeys. Managing them is looks complicated and I don't understand the ramifcations of what I'm doing.
Also a style nit, it's OK to use "he" or "she" pronouns in a contrived narrative. The "they/their" usage really detracted from the clarity of the example.
It's obviously okay to use he or she - not sure why it wouldn't be. I'm confused why you have a problem with the author's choice not to - I don't see any clarify issues caused by it.
Nothing in this post is specific to passkeys; it reads like advice to not encrypt data. There’s no way to prevent some users from losing their encryption key anyway. Whatever warnings you include, even when software doesn't connect to the internet and just encrypts local files, someone will write to support that they forgot their password and ask you to "reset" it.
This give much more conscious control to the user knowing that they are explicitly encrypting which file with which passkey. Additionally, you can just download the page and serve it via localhost so that you always have control of the relying party for your passkey.
Another way to say this is that you have to have an account recovery process and you need to think about how your encryption interacts with account recovery.
100% of the arguments against using passkeys for e2ee data apply to using passkeys as credentials.
(Unless they are not credentials, and you can loose them then do a password reset via a phishing prone channel like email and SMS. Supporting this eliminates any possible user benefit of passkeys.)
In addition to the arguments in the article, when used as credentials, they are an obvious trojan horse allowing large websites to completely hijack your operating system.
Don’t believe me? Try logging into a bank or using rideshare/parking/ev charging with degoogled android. This is where passkeys are taking PCs, and it is their only purpose.
> Don’t believe me? Try logging into a bank or using rideshare/parking/ev charging with degoogled android.
What does root detection and other device attestation have to do with passkeys? Passkeys (at least Google's and Apple's) don't support device attestation.
I was looking into this to start using this. Because it’s quite user friendly to not let the user worry about all the details that involve encryption of data.
I guess informing them is a good way to start. Are there any other tips on how this can be improved?
How many people are doing a spring cleaning of unused passkeys in their password managers? We're talking like a kilobyte of data, nobody needs to delete these things in any kind of normal circumstance.
Sure, it would be great if users would store 5 copies of their encryption keys, with one in a lockbox on the bottom of the ocean. But that's just not going to happen at any kind of scale, so an automatic way of putting encryption keys in a replicated password manager makes sense. And compared to how people normally handle end-to-end encryption keys, it's going to result in a lot less loss data in practice.
I thought the point of passkey security is that you don't have to send the private key around, it can stay on your device. Different passkey per device. Lose or destroy a device, delete that passkey and move on.
I don't know about spring cleaning, but it's pretty easy to delete by accident if you connect to the browser or OS when setting up instead of the password manager.
That said, I've been assuming I could have multiple passkeys per site and that's turning out to not always be something websites behave sanely about.
Most password managers implementing passkeys only allow one passkey per account entry, and I've ended up with multiple passkeys per site, while the site only supports one (and deletes the others upon creating a new one), so I've been in the exact situation of not knowing which entries are safe to delete before.
This is usually due to relying party and possibly password manager bugs, but it does happen.
Passkeys have way too many footguns for me. If I use my phone to sign in I'm going to accidentally create a passkey there on iOS embedded webview. When I use Google Chrome, the website won't give me any information for me to find where I stored the passkey. Was it in iOS keyring? Chrome? My Bitwarden? If I had any discipline around this it would make sense but if I accidentally double tap on the screen I've got a passkey and it's stuck on my phone.
I'm sure it's of use to many people but it's been no end of pain for me and it has really signaled to me what it's like to grow into an old man unable to use computers when I was once a young man who would find this easy.
For this reason I am avoiding it like a plague. It is an additional way to fingerprint your activity and the scenarios where you migrate your passkeys from a device to another seems not really well "oiled"
Passkeys on iOS and macOS actually work quite well in that regard. They get stored in your provider of choice across the web, web views, apps etc., at least in my experience.
Mine is Bitwarden, and that's available on pretty much all platforms, natively where available (except on macOS currently), as a browser extension otherwise.
For the rare instance in which I need to authenticate using a passkey on a computer where I'm not logged into Bitwarden, there's the cross-device CaBLE flow where I can scan a QR code with my phone and use Bitwarden to authenticate. This works across OSes and browsers.
I just use iOS' wallet for all of it, the only exception being if its something I 100% need to open outside of my iphone / macs. Then I go for BitWarden, turns out I dont need any apps to open outside of that sandbox, I am okay only opening these up on Mac. I can always type my password on Linux. That's what bitwarden is for anyway.
Yup. I hate them. I get the problem they're trying to solve, it just seems like I have more work to do... and I honestly don't even follow what is going on sometimes.
I recently moved to a new computer and it's just an AUTHHELLSCAPE.
>If I had any discipline around this it would make sense but if I accidentally double tap on the screen I've got a passkey and it's stuck on my phone.
The problem is not with passkey rather system such as iOS keeps a tight lid on how files are uploaded and retrieved from the device. There is a real disconnect between desktop and mobile file system now days.
I like the concept of them, and I want them to work well purely so people stop using bad passwords. But nearly everywhere does it differently and weirdly and likely wrongly.
When I log into my Amazon account with a passkey, it then asks me for a 2FA code. The 2FA code is stored on the same device as a passkey, that step literally does nothing. After I do the 2FA code, it then prompts me to create a passkey. No! I have one. I signed in with one.
Some devices give me the option to use a QR code. I like that option usually, I can easily use my phone to authenticate. But sometimes i can’t get the QR code to appear. Support varies by OS, browser, and set of installed extensions. And there’s no easy way to control which of those three handles the passkey when something decides wrongly.
I had to troubleshoot something on someone else’s computer, and saw that they logged in to windows with a passkey and QR code. I’ve looked, and I can’t seem to set that up on my windows computer. There isn’t an option to and I have no idea why.
> I'm sure it's of use to many people but it's been no end of pain for me and it has really signaled to me what it's like to grow into an old man unable to use computers when I was once a young man who would find this easy.
My only "good" solution for passkey UX is to make sure all my devices are Apple. Apple's password/keychain integrates reasonably well enough with Chrome, I can share passkeys with my cofounder easily in shared folder (he is also all-in on Apple ecosystem) and I can share passkeys with my work computer (different AppleID) for low-stakes things like news websites or Amazon.com (I work in IT security for the org, so I know exactly how much I can trust my employer)
I do also use Linux and Windows personally, and the passkey story is much worse there, particularly for Linux which doesn't seem to play well with my Yubikeys. Luckily, a lot of websites seem to have a "Scan this QR code with your iPhone" feature to complete the passkey authentication.
I like them but I must be the owner of them. Not Google, Apple or Microsoft. And be able to save the private keys for safekeeping, something the fido alliance doesn't really want me to do. We finally have bit warden but there's still some usability issues with that.
Right now most sites that I use that allow them have conditions that make it impossible to use for me. For example PayPal only allows them in chrome and edge.
So yeah I'll wait for them to become actually open and usable.
Mom can't figure out what they are or how to use them. They bind you to your device/iCloud/Gaia account so if it gets stolen/banned you're out of luck (yeah yeah multiple devices and paths to auth and backup codes, none of that matters). It's one further step down the attested hardware software and eyeballs path. Passwords forever, shortcomings be damned.
> As of October 2025, passkey login has been fully rolled out and is now required for members with Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) and Reimbursement Accounts (RAs) who use the HealthEquity Mobile app and web experience.
The FAQ is a little misleading by saying WHEN your account has a passkey this and that, but reality is that after October they made them completely mandatory, no bypass, no exceptions. 100% coverage.
Oh, and by the way, passkeys have been broken on PC/Linux when using Firefox for months:
> There Was A Problem: We encountered an error contacting the login service. Please try again in a few minutes.
Neat. You have to use Chrome or Edge.... For months, after making it mandatory...
Also a password could be the passkey, the passkey protocol is basically a way to send to a server an authenticated public key. The client could deterministically convert passwords to key-pairs and authenticate with those
>They bind you to your device/iCloud/Gaia account so if it gets stolen/banned you're out of luck
This is the biggest myth/misconception I see repeated about passkeys all the time. It's a credential just like your password. If you forget it, you go through a reset flow where a link is sent to your email and you just setup a new one.
And if it happens to be your Gmail account that you're locked out of, you need to go through the same Google Account Recovery flow regardless of whether you're using a password or a passkey.
On a similar note mooltipass can export an encrypted backup of passkeys.
That said platform should support multiple passkeys so if you lose access to one you arent screwed over.
Probably everything else is debatable, I do agree with one thing though, the cat is indeed out of the bag. It would have been probably a really good use case if the scope was limited to only hardware based security keys for enterprise users only.
Rolling it out for OS platforms, software based authenticators just muddies the water. You cannot even provide any guarantees around it being phishing resistant anymore.
It is conundrum that passkeys were designed to help the majority as they are frictionless (like passwordmanagers etc) but fail in reality.
Even those that have 2 devices they don't have them all the time.
Another overlooked issue is that some banks etc don't allow for 2 devices as login or 2FA. Even if it allowed one needs to keep the spare device always updated. Either Govt needs to build a common API that one can use directly through google pay or apple pay - so that only one app is needed to be kept up to date.
to be honest, I wouldn't mind if google/Apple can take all my private data and passkeys hold them - but at least then if I lose the phone - and I show my ID they should allow me to setup my new phone. But that is also not possible. (I am discounting the awful AI bans)
Passkeys to me come across as a part solution to a valid problem. Education is part of the solution. Treating the user as too dumb to understand why they need strong passwords or passkeys is important.
I actually despair about when my family members are forced into passkeys and then lose access to their accounts because they get a new device.
I use passkeys from keepasxc because the native workflow for passkeys is opaque and easy to misunderstand what you are actually doing. And it's predicated on having an account with big us tech companies.
> "Even if there were explanatory text, Erika, like most users, doesn’t typically read through every dialog box, and they certainly can’t be expected to remember this technical detail a year from now."
Passkeys are a step in the right direction, ironically for the exact reason the author advises caution. We've been telling people to "store your backup key somewhere safe" for the best part of a decade now, and your average Erika hasn't got on well with that at all. Locking themselves out and losing data left, right and centre.
If you've worked at any kind of scale you'll know well that a certain percentage of users will lose their data with E2EE, full stop. It's just different from everything else they've ever used. These are the same people who'd be lost without the "forgot password" link, and there's no shame in that. That's just the reality of it. And passkeys can help people like this to not lose their keys.
If the product is truly E2EE, the best options right now are the passkey implementations baked into Chrome or Apple. Windows, as ever, needs a bit of work, but the password managers seem to be picking up the slack well enough. We also need to educate people that with true E2EE there is no "forgot password" email. Passkeys and the tooling around them still have a ways to go, but we're getting there.
This story of a user deleting their passkey doesn't seem plausible to me. They don't remember why they have a specific passkey for a messaging app? Surely recognizing the app that stores so many memories is enough not to delete the passkey. And why are they "cleaning up" their passkeys in the first place? Yes I put "cleaning up" in quotes, this metaphor, suggesting that a long list of unused passkeys is dirty in some way is inappropriate.
If an app has a billion users, how many do you expect will delete their passkey for no reason? Is this more important then end-to-end encryption for everyone?
If deleting one's passkey for no reason was a thing, I'd expect a real story about a real user, rather then a made-up scenario.
The essay has a condescending attitude towards the normie computer user who can't possibly be expected to know, but it's precisely the normie computer user who would never get the stupid idea of "cleaning up" their passkeys in the first place -- that's something only a nerd with a neurotic attitude to their computer would do.
> The essay has a condescending attitude towards the normie computer user who can't possibly be expected to know, but it's precisely the normie computer user who would never get the stupid idea of "cleaning up" their passkeys in the first place -- that's something only a nerd with a neurotic attitude to their computer would do.
Thanks for the feedback. That certainly wasn't the intention. It was more about the average user not remembering specific details about their passkeys. Which I do stand by. If you have some suggested text to help clarify that, happy to update the post.
Somewhat related, i recently ran into the issue, after i created an account on Confer.to [1] on my Desktop, i couldn't login on my iPad / iOS with Proton Pass and/or Bitwarden.
The error message was: "Error: "Authenticator did not return a PRF result — this passkey probably isn’t PRF-capable."
So i now have an account, but can only use it on my Desktop.
(can't change to a password login either, it's Passkeys only...)
[1] end-to-end encrypted AI, developed by Moxie Marlinspike, the founder of Signal: https://confer.to/
73 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 75.3 ms ] threadYou can remember a strong generated password if it's a pass phrase. Better "rememberability" with the same amount of entropy.
Also a style nit, it's OK to use "he" or "she" pronouns in a contrived narrative. The "they/their" usage really detracted from the clarity of the example.
Good advice at the end, though.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46895533
This give much more conscious control to the user knowing that they are explicitly encrypting which file with which passkey. Additionally, you can just download the page and serve it via localhost so that you always have control of the relying party for your passkey.
[0] https://words.filippo.io/passkey-encryption/
(Unless they are not credentials, and you can loose them then do a password reset via a phishing prone channel like email and SMS. Supporting this eliminates any possible user benefit of passkeys.)
In addition to the arguments in the article, when used as credentials, they are an obvious trojan horse allowing large websites to completely hijack your operating system.
Don’t believe me? Try logging into a bank or using rideshare/parking/ev charging with degoogled android. This is where passkeys are taking PCs, and it is their only purpose.
So, “Don’t use passkeys” would be a better title.
What does root detection and other device attestation have to do with passkeys? Passkeys (at least Google's and Apple's) don't support device attestation.
I guess informing them is a good way to start. Are there any other tips on how this can be improved?
Sure, it would be great if users would store 5 copies of their encryption keys, with one in a lockbox on the bottom of the ocean. But that's just not going to happen at any kind of scale, so an automatic way of putting encryption keys in a replicated password manager makes sense. And compared to how people normally handle end-to-end encryption keys, it's going to result in a lot less loss data in practice.
That said, I've been assuming I could have multiple passkeys per site and that's turning out to not always be something websites behave sanely about.
This is usually due to relying party and possibly password manager bugs, but it does happen.
I'm sure it's of use to many people but it's been no end of pain for me and it has really signaled to me what it's like to grow into an old man unable to use computers when I was once a young man who would find this easy.
https://cedwards.xyz/passkeys-are-not-2fa/
Mine is Bitwarden, and that's available on pretty much all platforms, natively where available (except on macOS currently), as a browser extension otherwise.
For the rare instance in which I need to authenticate using a passkey on a computer where I'm not logged into Bitwarden, there's the cross-device CaBLE flow where I can scan a QR code with my phone and use Bitwarden to authenticate. This works across OSes and browsers.
I recently moved to a new computer and it's just an AUTHHELLSCAPE.
The problem is not with passkey rather system such as iOS keeps a tight lid on how files are uploaded and retrieved from the device. There is a real disconnect between desktop and mobile file system now days.
This is not an issue on iOS, I can’t tell how what you’re describing could happen.
When I log into my Amazon account with a passkey, it then asks me for a 2FA code. The 2FA code is stored on the same device as a passkey, that step literally does nothing. After I do the 2FA code, it then prompts me to create a passkey. No! I have one. I signed in with one.
Some devices give me the option to use a QR code. I like that option usually, I can easily use my phone to authenticate. But sometimes i can’t get the QR code to appear. Support varies by OS, browser, and set of installed extensions. And there’s no easy way to control which of those three handles the passkey when something decides wrongly.
I had to troubleshoot something on someone else’s computer, and saw that they logged in to windows with a passkey and QR code. I’ve looked, and I can’t seem to set that up on my windows computer. There isn’t an option to and I have no idea why.
My only "good" solution for passkey UX is to make sure all my devices are Apple. Apple's password/keychain integrates reasonably well enough with Chrome, I can share passkeys with my cofounder easily in shared folder (he is also all-in on Apple ecosystem) and I can share passkeys with my work computer (different AppleID) for low-stakes things like news websites or Amazon.com (I work in IT security for the org, so I know exactly how much I can trust my employer)
I do also use Linux and Windows personally, and the passkey story is much worse there, particularly for Linux which doesn't seem to play well with my Yubikeys. Luckily, a lot of websites seem to have a "Scan this QR code with your iPhone" feature to complete the passkey authentication.
Right now most sites that I use that allow them have conditions that make it impossible to use for me. For example PayPal only allows them in chrome and edge.
So yeah I'll wait for them to become actually open and usable.
Better title.
Mom can't figure out what they are or how to use them. They bind you to your device/iCloud/Gaia account so if it gets stolen/banned you're out of luck (yeah yeah multiple devices and paths to auth and backup codes, none of that matters). It's one further step down the attested hardware software and eyeballs path. Passwords forever, shortcomings be damned.
https://www.healthequity.com
> As of October 2025, passkey login has been fully rolled out and is now required for members with Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) and Reimbursement Accounts (RAs) who use the HealthEquity Mobile app and web experience.
https://help.healthequity.com/en/articles/11690915-passkey-f...
The FAQ is a little misleading by saying WHEN your account has a passkey this and that, but reality is that after October they made them completely mandatory, no bypass, no exceptions. 100% coverage.
Oh, and by the way, passkeys have been broken on PC/Linux when using Firefox for months:
> There Was A Problem: We encountered an error contacting the login service. Please try again in a few minutes.
Neat. You have to use Chrome or Edge.... For months, after making it mandatory...
Isn't it why good practice is to bind at least 2 hardware passkeys and/or have recovery codes?
Sure someone can steal your phone/laptop/yubikeybio but then you can use the NitroKey you have at home in your drawer to recover your account.
This is the biggest myth/misconception I see repeated about passkeys all the time. It's a credential just like your password. If you forget it, you go through a reset flow where a link is sent to your email and you just setup a new one.
And if it happens to be your Gmail account that you're locked out of, you need to go through the same Google Account Recovery flow regardless of whether you're using a password or a passkey.
It's super sad to see all kinds of websites offering you to add a passkey when you log in.
Then don't use Apple's/Google's/whatever Gaia is as your passkey provider?
> Mom can't figure out what they are or how to use them.
Then do something nice for your mom and set her up with Bitwarden, 1Password or KeepassXC, which prevents the platform lock-in.
> It's one further step down the attested hardware software and eyeballs path.
None of the synchronized passkey implementations, which big tech has been pushing lately, support attestation, so this is just FUD.
Yubikeys do, but fortunately they don't seem to have the (non-enterprise) weight to make it mandatory for all passkeys.
Even those that have 2 devices they don't have them all the time.
Another overlooked issue is that some banks etc don't allow for 2 devices as login or 2FA. Even if it allowed one needs to keep the spare device always updated. Either Govt needs to build a common API that one can use directly through google pay or apple pay - so that only one app is needed to be kept up to date.
to be honest, I wouldn't mind if google/Apple can take all my private data and passkeys hold them - but at least then if I lose the phone - and I show my ID they should allow me to setup my new phone. But that is also not possible. (I am discounting the awful AI bans)
They’ll teach us what we need to know to create something that will do what they’re trying to do.
I actually despair about when my family members are forced into passkeys and then lose access to their accounts because they get a new device.
I use passkeys from keepasxc because the native workflow for passkeys is opaque and easy to misunderstand what you are actually doing. And it's predicated on having an account with big us tech companies.
People forget and reset passwords all the time. Passkeys are no different, except now they'll lose them less.
Passkeys are a step in the right direction, ironically for the exact reason the author advises caution. We've been telling people to "store your backup key somewhere safe" for the best part of a decade now, and your average Erika hasn't got on well with that at all. Locking themselves out and losing data left, right and centre.
If you've worked at any kind of scale you'll know well that a certain percentage of users will lose their data with E2EE, full stop. It's just different from everything else they've ever used. These are the same people who'd be lost without the "forgot password" link, and there's no shame in that. That's just the reality of it. And passkeys can help people like this to not lose their keys.
If the product is truly E2EE, the best options right now are the passkey implementations baked into Chrome or Apple. Windows, as ever, needs a bit of work, but the password managers seem to be picking up the slack well enough. We also need to educate people that with true E2EE there is no "forgot password" email. Passkeys and the tooling around them still have a ways to go, but we're getting there.
If an app has a billion users, how many do you expect will delete their passkey for no reason? Is this more important then end-to-end encryption for everyone?
If deleting one's passkey for no reason was a thing, I'd expect a real story about a real user, rather then a made-up scenario.
The essay has a condescending attitude towards the normie computer user who can't possibly be expected to know, but it's precisely the normie computer user who would never get the stupid idea of "cleaning up" their passkeys in the first place -- that's something only a nerd with a neurotic attitude to their computer would do.
Thanks for the feedback. That certainly wasn't the intention. It was more about the average user not remembering specific details about their passkeys. Which I do stand by. If you have some suggested text to help clarify that, happy to update the post.
The error message was: "Error: "Authenticator did not return a PRF result — this passkey probably isn’t PRF-capable."
So i now have an account, but can only use it on my Desktop. (can't change to a password login either, it's Passkeys only...)
[1] end-to-end encrypted AI, developed by Moxie Marlinspike, the founder of Signal: https://confer.to/