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This blog post is not about passkey attestation. I have no strong opinion on the subject that has inspired a controversy over the past few days. However, the controversy did inspire me to write about passkeys again, and passkeys do currently feel like a trap to me, for reasons other than attestation. Admittedly, my reasons may be specific to the Apple ecosystem, as someone who stumbled into a career writing software for Apple devices, with no financially viable alternative. Three years ago I expressed skepticism of passkeys in a blog post, Passkeys: A loss of user control? Since then, the major credential manager vendors have adopted a credential exchange protocol to migrate passkeys between credential managers. Although I’m not impressed that the vendors promoted passkeys for years without this essential feature, it’s better late than never. The credential exchange protocol nevertheless contributes nothing toward mitigating my previous concerns about passkeys, because I have no interest in migrating between credential managers or platforms. Thus, I continue to shun passkeys and stick with my good old passwords, randomly generated for each account.
\nI have at least two requirements for my credentials:
\nA device that’s new to me may be a device that I’ve newly purchased, or it may be someone else’s device, owned by a friend, a family member, an apartment building, a public library. In other words, I should be able to log into a website without using a credential manager! Indeed I wouldn’t want to save my credentials in a credential manager on someone else’s device. Believe it or not, I never sign my own iPhone into iCloud, which I don’t trust; I’ll discuss one reason why in this blog post. While I have no need to rely on public library computers, some people do, and occasionally I need to use the printer attached to the shared apartment building computers. I can’t say I’m particularly worried about hackers living in my suburban Wisconsin residence or visiting my local library. In fact I’d love to meet one.
\nPasswords are practically perfect for the purpose of entering credentials on a new device. You can read a password from the screen of one device and type it into another, write a password on a piece of paper, or even memorize a password. Plain text is the ultimate portable data format. With passkeys, the best solution is probably a portable hardware security device such as a YubiKey. That would work, as long as websites support the creation of multiple passkeys per account, one passkey to store on the YubiKey and another to store on my MacBook Pro. I don’t want to rely on a YubiKey as the primary store of my credentials, because you can’t make backups of a YubiKey, and because the requirement of an external plugged-in device is inconvenient.
\nI do sign my MacBook Pro into iCloud, but I don’t allow iCloud to sync any of my personal data, not even iCloud Keychain. I use Little Snitch to control how macOS phones home; unfortunately nothing like Little Snitch is possible on iOS. The only reason I use iCloud is to test the sync feature of my App Store apps for my customers. From my perspective, a fatal flaw of iCloud Keychain is that it’s hostile to backups, a problem I blogged about early last year. That blog post did not actually mention passkeys, but the same considerations apply, because both passwords and passkeys are handled by iCloud Keychain and the Apple Passwords app. I wrote:
\n\nContrast iCloud Keychain to the login keychain on your Mac. The login keychain is relatively friendly to backup systems. It consists of a single file on disk that can be copied to other disks and read by the Keychain Access app on any Mac, as long as you know the login password.
Incredibly, as of macOS 26.4, this is no longer true! Apple seems intent on sabotaging backups. (See also hdiutil is deprecated in macOS 27 Golden Gate and Inaccessible .bnnsir files on macOS Sequoia.)
\nFor some damn reason, macOS requires iCloud Keychain in order to save a passkey on your Mac.
\nThere are “More Options,” but those options involve saving the passkey on a different device: iPhone, iPad, Android, or an external security key, such as a YubiKey.
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If only Apple would relax the iCloud Keychain requirement and allow me to save passkeys in a local format that I could back up and restore, then I might switch from passwords to passkeys. As long as the iCloud Keychain requirement remains, though, passkeys are anathema. I don’t even need the ability to access a passkey private key directly, like an ssh private key in the ~/.ssh/ directory. I just need the ability to manually manage my passkey database. Why is that too much to ask?
Perhaps the passkey backup situation is better with credential managers other than iCloud Keychain. In any case, I have no desire to use third-party credential managers for my passwords, so their support for passkeys wouldn’t persuade me to switch from passwords to passkeys. I shouldn’t need to become dependent on third-party software for an essential workflow: providing credentials to websites in a web browser. It’s astonishing that Apple itself can’t accommodate me, a dedicated user of Apple devices and Apple Safari.
\nA common defense of arbitrary Apple restrictions is that Apple designs them for the good of unsophisticated computer users, so-called “average” users, as opposed to sophisticated users like myself, “power” users. I’ve always felt, however, that the dichotomy and alleged opposition between sophisticated and unsophisticated computer users is false and counterproductive. Every sophisticated user was originally an unsophisticated user, who can become more sophisticated with more experience and knowledge. When unsophisticated users inevitably experience trouble with their computers, who helps them? The sophisticated users, of course! I resent the insinuation by some Apple defenders that critics of Apple are utterly self-centered, caring nothing about the plight of unsophisticated users, as if we somehow had no family or friends of our own. My mother, for instance, goes to me for tech support. I’m deeply suspicious of corporate paternalism—the idea that Apple knows best—both because of the potential financial conflict of interest between stockholders and customers and because corporate-employed engineers have no business playing parent for customers who are old enough to be their parent. Oh my sweet summer child! Sadly, corporate paternalism and vendor lockdown too often prevent sophisticated users from helping unsophisticated users, reducing all users to childlike helplessness.
\nThe two credential requirements that I listed earlier are not unique to sophisticated users. I recognize them as requirements when evaluating passkeys. Unsophisticated users may not recognize them as requirements… until it’s too late. iCloud Keychain does not magically provide a better backup system for unsophisticated users than it does for sophisticated users. The system sucks for all of us. The difference is just that I’m sophisticated enough to recognize how badly it sucks. There’s a crucial difference between simplification, which is desirable, and oversimplification, which is not. The monopolistic tech corporations have a tendency to overshoot the former, landing on the latter. I can’t say from the outside whether this result is intentional or not, but it’s lamentable.
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