I’m an advocate for passkeys and I abolished passwords and embraced discoverable passkeys for our org’s key internal systems exclusively. So the battle cry of a title immediately put me on the defensive, unfortunately. The urge to not read is strong. A more measured title may help here.

But there’s definitely a kernel of truth here. 1Password recently began to enforce userVerification: required[1][2], and suddenly on the desktop without TouchID I have to enter my login password to use the passkey on a good number of websites. I didn’t sign up for 1Password 15 years ago so that I have to enter both my very complex master password and very complex login password to sign into websites, the “one password” contract is suddenly broken after 15 years. This experience independently alarmed me about the additional constraints potential of the passkey standard and power wielded by the FIDO Alliance and partnering organizations addressed in TFA, which are, to be clear, useful for security in an organization. (We use userVerification: preferred now btw.)

Therefore, I believe the passkey technology is great for enforcing a standard of security in an organization and stand by my choice for my org. But as a general purpose B2C auth tech, if the additional constraints become widely adopted, user freedom will be seriously harmed.

Edit: I asked Opus 5.5 to vibe code a passkey auth solution in Go a few times without saying anything specific about userVerification. It chose required each time. So expect to see more of these. Oh and vibe coding auth without understanding it entirely is bad, please don’t do that.

[1] https://web.dev/articles/webauthn-user-verification

[2] https://www.1password.community/1password-at-home-31/user-ve...