These are endpoint malware attacks, not attacks on Passkeys per se. This is already a game-over position for an attacker to be in.
It is hard to find the content for all of the glitzy ads on this site.
There's ads?
But when you do, there are glaring holes these people uncovered.
"You must enable DRM to play some audio or video on this page" pops up in the strangest places...
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>4. Using the hash of that handshake, the attacker interacts with the victim’s TPM and uses the extracted identity key to sign the handshake hash together with the assertion request
Huh? If you have this level of local privileges you can just read session cookies from the browsers store? I guess stealing all the keys is notable, but you can manipulate any password manager with this level of access right?
What's the threat model here, that synced passkeys should be secure in even in situations involving compromised clients? How?
At least for accounts you want to keep very secure, session cookies are probably very time-limited. Stealing a passkey ensures persistent access in the future.
But I largely agree, if they're able to do this on your system you're already hacked and they can do a ton of very bad things.
It's not that simple. The stolen file has no clear text passwords and ideally, these passwords can only be decrypted on the right hardware with user confirmation. Of course, eternal and repeated confirmation requests are an anti pattern all their own, but the cloud attestation service not verifying the hardware sounds like a really glaring omission.
It kinda is. If they use Chrome and it's cloud backed password manager, odds are they use GMail. That plus full access to a trusted device (which you have in this scenario) allows you to change their Google account password. Boom, full persistence.
I can think of at least a dozen easier ways to do nefarious things with this level of access that are at least that simple. As an example, faking user attribution would be trivial.
How could Google patch this? If the client is compromised and the attacker can manipulate the local TPM or it's equivalent there's no defense.
Boy I’m so tired of people trying to make clever attack names. They don’t help remember things, there are too many.
So all 3 “pass-ta-key” attacks are not attacks on passkeys, they’re attacks on the Google vault.
And if you get access to the vault, then you get everything. OK. And if you get access to a synced traditional password vault, then you get everything.
So… meh. These are bugs, they will be fixed. Good on them for disclosing them. But this does not prove that passkeys are terrible. This does not make them less secure than random passwords.
If it wasn’t for the fact that they just happen to be getting passkeys, seems like this wouldn’t be worth a headline or discussing at all. And if they have this level of access, then they also get all the standard password credentials in the vault too, right?
Have we standardized a way to backup and export passkeys yet? Do websites commonly allow multiple passkeys to be registered?
There’s FIDO CXF/CXP: https://fidoalliance.org/specs/cx/cxf-v1.0-ps-errata-2026030...
To my understanding both Apple Passwords and the Android equivalent allow you to export passkeys to a different app (password manager), but I haven’t tried it yet.
If anyone has direct experience I appreciate to know how it was.
The right questions. The ability to set up an alternate key in advance is functionally similar to being able to make a backup.
If I had my 'druthers:
1. You can register multiple keys, such as for different devices. Like 5-10, not two.
2. There are two categories of keys: "Regular" and "Backup/Recovery".
3. Attempting to use a Backup Recovery key prompts to user to confirm that they want to discard all regular keys and promote the backup key(s) to the new regular.
In this way, a compromised backup key can't be used secretively.