Comment by johnduhart
8 days ago
> I can't use a passkey on a device unless I can install my password manager on that device and I am comfortable giving that device access to my passkeys.
That's simply not true. I'm able to log onto GitHub on my corporate device using a passkey that's kept in 1Password on my iPhone.
That's fine if you've got a couple of supported devices. The hardware support is however very bad. If my hardware is unsupported (and most hardware in the world is unsupported) that's not very helpful.
This "use a passcode from another device such as my phone" tech mentioned above is just Bluetooth LTE. Every phone and most laptops and desktops in the last decade or so has Bluetooth LTE support. Hardware support is very good.
Passkeys are built on Webauthn (and ultimately sort of synonymous with it) and that has always been the web standard for all physical key support such as Yubikey and is basically the same as it has been for decades when dealing with Passkeys only with updated UX on top. Hardware support here is pretty good, too.
Since you made this mistake a few times:
Its Bluetooth LE, not LTE!
LTE is 4g, LE is a Bluetooth spec (literally means Low Energy).
Bluetooth is very hard to use. This just isn't about hardware support, it's about "how long does it actually take the average person to do a Bluetooth-mediated workflow, how consistent is it between devices, if someone is trying it with a new device, what is the learning curve?" If someone can't figure out how it's supposed to work between their iPhone and their Windows laptop, there might theoretically be support. Practically speaking it's broken most of the time.
The deeper problem is that the default behavior is storing a passkey directly on a specific device and hardware-locking it to that device. That's great if you're an enterprise or whatever and you've got SSO set up well. For the average person, "I lose my iPhone and it effectively resets all my passwords" is a hopelessly unusable workflow.
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