this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2024
83 points (96.6% liked)
Privacy
31982 readers
370 users here now
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
Chat rooms
-
[Matrix/Element]Dead
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Passwords can be leaked, mostly by bad security on server side.
Passkeys use secure keys, it checks public keys on both sides and send private key to authenticate, without both keys can't login or if the server is compromised.
It's like GPG or SSH works.
Close but private keys don't get sent.
It sends information encrypted via your public key to your client, then your client proves that it's the real owner of the key by decrypting the message, and then sending a new message back encrypted by the private key that the server can then verify.
This is what's better than a password, the information for providing authentication (the private key) never leaves your computer (where as you almost in all implementations of password based auth, send the password itself to the server).
A question, since you sound like you know what you're talking about. Is this analagous to password-free SSH? I.e., private key used to log in on the basis of a pre-agreed public key?
It's PKI, public key infrastructure. It's secure so it's used in many applications. Including ssh using keys.