My same response as always: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34853404

I don't think the Passkey ecosystem is mature enough to be used as is, and I don't think it's good for us to naively accept that passkeys will get more portable in the future; there are multiple parts of the ecosystem that do not look like they're set up to move in that direction. Prove that they'll be portable, make them portable first. Make an implementation that works on my Linux devices and that won't immediately get blocked for failing attestation requests. Make a client that is Open Source where I can modify the code myself and use it in the real world without losing access to my keys. Then I'll pay attention.

The overall discussion and debate about passkeys also gives me a lot of doubt about them. There are comments in this comment section saying that FIDO keys and Passkeys are portable because you can use them with other devices. No, that's not what portable means. The fact that you can use your phone or hardware token to log into a website doesn't mean the credentials you have on that hardware token or phone are portable. You can't recompile the firmware on those devices and keep access to your passkeys. You can't move those passkeys between devices easily (you can one-by-one create new passkeys on other devices if they're supported, but come on, that is not real portability).

I don't have a lot of confidence about passkeys because I don't really see that passkey proponents understand the problems people have with them, and they're often extremely dismissive of those concerns. Yes, I understand that passkeys are on some level designed to be hard to port. Yubikeys don't have a backup/export option on purpose. But what I'm saying is that those design goals are incompatible with building a general replacement for passwords for ordinary people.

There's some really cool stuff with FIDO that I would love to love, but I just don't have confidence that the people involved in the standard understand what the criticisms are, and I don't see how it becomes a generally accessible standard when those concerns aren't addressed -- and in fact, when we start talking about stuff like hardware attestation, when we start getting into parts of the spec where migration between platforms is explicitly supposed to be platform-dependent -- those are actively harmful parts of the spec that should be rejected. They're not just "we haven't gotten to building it yet", they're bad decisions.

But I'm happy to change my mind. Give me a version of this that works on my Linux computers and give me a version of this that works on my Android phone running a custom De-Googled ROM. Give me a version where I can log into a computer that doesn't have bluetooth running, that doesn't require me to buy multiple 3rd-party hardware devices to handle log-in and backup, and that doesn't require me to manually update multiple keys for every single login. Show me that working on real sites and I'll happily change my mind about it. There's parts of FIDO that I do really like.

It's just that those good parts are not worth naively playing into a process that's going to end with making it practically impossible for people to exercise control over their own data and their own devices.