Comment by AlotOfReading
8 days ago
YubiKeys have been a thing at Google and other major tech companies for almost two decades now and the effects are well-studied.
My experience is that yubikeys have a tendency to get lost, get cleared, get mixed up (which of my 4 identical yubikeys has the right passkey?), stop working reliably from random USB issues, etc. And worse, yubikeys are awful to use. Like am I seriously supposed to take off my phone case every time I want to plug in a yubikey to the USB-C port (which may or may not be working depending on whether moisture has condensed in the port) so I can use the one mobile browser that supports them to retrieve a passkey every time I want to log in?
No, fuck that. Just let me use an SSH cert at that point. The existence of phishing is a comparatively minor evil.
Your "SSH cert" option, in a consumer package, is effectively the passkey.
SSH doesn't prevent key sharing (and hence, phishing), so it's fundamentally different in the context of this discussion.
> ...sharing (and hence, phishing)
Sharing and phishing are on two different axes. You can have shareable credentials that are phishing-resistant when used.
You can have hardware-backed SSH keys that are not cloneable. You would need the browser to prevent phishing while still using SSH agent as its underlying signature mechanism (implied by my "in a consumer package").
Right, which is why Passkeys are consumer-minded enhancement to SSH keys in that browsers are asked to require that every domain gets a different passkey. I've seen SSH agents with that requirement, but yes very few users of SSH use more than one public key per device at a time, and many even use the same private key across multiple devices rather than enroll multiple SSH public keys.