Comment by thesuperbigfrog
2 years ago
>> Literally requires the exact same cognitive load as using keys to start your car. The problem is that so many people got comfortable delegating all their financial and data risk to third parties, and those third parties aren't excited about giving up that power.
This perfectly describes the current situation with passkeys.
Passkeys are a great idea--they are like difficult, if not impossible-to-guess passwords generated for you and stored in a given implementor's system (Apple, Google, your password manager, etc.).
Until passkey systems support key export and import, I predict that they will see limited use.
Who wants to trust your passkeys to a big corporation or third party? Vendor lock-in is a huge issue that cannot be overlooked.
Let me generate, store, and backup MY passkeys where I want them.
That doesn't solve the general "I don't want to have to manage my keys" attitude that some people have, but it prevents vendor lock-in.
Why export/import? Just create new passkeys on whatever device or service you want, and register those as well. OR just use a yubikey, put it on your keyring, and use it to log into everything.
Most crypto wallets do have import/export enabled though, so if you're logging in with a web3 identity, everything should just work.
>> Why export/import?
Why not have key export and import?
Are they my keys or not?
>> Just create new passkeys on whatever device or service you want, and register those as well.
I would rather not have different keys for each device for each account. It is an unnecessary combinatorial explosion of keys that requires more effort than is really needed.
When you get a new device, you need to generate and add new keys for every account. Why can't you just import existing keys?
What's this? It should be one key per device. That key should get you into any site for which that key is approved. It's the exact opposite of a combinatorial explosion. Instead of needing credentials for every single site you want to authenticate to, you should just need one key per device that you want to auth with. A phone, a laptop, maybe a yubikey, and that's it.