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I don't like passkeys | Ethan Hawksley (hawksley.dev)
submitted 1 month ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 0 points 1 month ago (9 children)

Passkeys are worthless trash, invented explicitly to save Microsoft and Google money on password reset server time.

They do not solve session hijacking. Any attacker that has your granny on the phone to read them her password can also tell granny to go to a link and give them her session cookies.

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  • [–] 16 points 1 month ago (4 children)

    You think big tech did this to save… on … CPU costs of password resets?

    This is actually really what you think?

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  • [–] 6 points 1 month ago (2 children)

    Not the commenter, but they're not taking about CPU costs.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    Fair, but costs of resets overall. This is not a factor in tech giant costs.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

    You world be very surprised. It's not what I directly work on, but there are entire programs dedicated to tracking and lowering the cost of password and account resets (and doing it securely). That last part is the hard thing. Large organizations can save millions of dollars if they can get people to not lose/forget their credentials -or- self service those resets (but even then, having that person do it is now losing their time and energy).

    It's not just indirect opportunity costs either, it's direct costs to the IT organization. Smaller teams can absorb this stuff as a rounding error on their time, but the second you're counting in the thousands, you need to deal with this type of thing. (And I'll repeat: securely)

    Now imagine doing it as a B2C+B2B organization like Google or Microsoft. The costs are staggering.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago

    Not CPU costs, processing costs. Password resets are actually quite expensive. Microsoft and Google pushed the FIDO Alliance toward widespread use of a passwordless login credential because it benefited them. Google and MS get tens of millions of password resets a year. So if each one of those cost them $2 (some companies spend as much as $70 on each one if a human is involved), that's literally tens of millions of dollars saved. Then you say "oh, for security" as the tie-in to not make it about your bottom line.

    https://www.authx.com/blog/how-much-does-a-password-reset-cost/ https://journal.jadaptive.com/the-true-cost-of-password-resets/ https://www.m365.fm/passwords-are-broken-passkeys-fix-everything/

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  • [–] -3 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    That's what CSRF mitigations are for.

    Do you actually understand how any of the modern web works or does your knowledge stop at W3Schools tutorials from the mid-2000s?

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