Comment by mpyne
7 days ago
> "Online" in the sense of "loaded in a device", as opposed to "sitting in my safe".
The "device" can be entirely virtual. I've written a passkey-compatible OIDC provider for use on my homelab and it uses passkeys. But the passkeys are just in a SQLite database, which can be copied wherever.
That's not advisable for security, which is one reason I've not released the provider for others to use, but passkeys can operate just fine with that.
If I wanted, the private key itself just be in something like AWS KMS instead of a SQLite database, and it would all still work fine. Nothing about passkeys itself requires a hardware device or that the key be unexportable.
> Nothing about passkeys itself requires a hardware device or that the key be unexportable.
That's all true, but also not the point of this thread (offline backups) or the post (attestation limiting user freedom).
All of which have solutions in this thread too. Nothing forces you to use a passkey provider that enforces attestation if that’s what your threat model worries about.
I admit that the 1+2 yubikey rotation mentioned elsewhere was clever and new to me, but I'd argue that none of the solutions in this thread were good enough.
> Nothing forces you to use a passkey provider that enforces attestation if that’s what your threat model worries about.
I'm very confused by this statement.
For starters, attestation is unrelated to the topic of offline backups discussed in this thread.
Second, the whole problem of attestation, as described in the original post, is that it's not you who decides when to use it. And it's not the passkey provider who enforces attestation, as you said. It's the Relying Party, like Netflix, who can unilaterally decide the minimum security features of my passkey scheme, with all their drawbacks, and attestation ensures that they're followed.
3 replies →