WebAuthn is yet another attempt to do an API for web authentication that doesn't involve passwords but that instead allows browsers, hardware tokens, and so on to do things more securely. "Passkeys" ( also ) is the marketing term for a "WebAuthn credential", and an increasing number of websites really, really want you to use a passkey for authentication instead of any other form of multi-factor authentication (they may or may not still require your password).

Most everyone that wants you to use passkeys also wants you to specifically use highly secure ones. The theoretically most secure are physical hardware security keys, followed by passkeys that are stored and protected in secure enclaves in various ways by the operating system (provided that the necessary special purpose hardware is available). Of course the flipside of 'secure' is 'locked in', whether locked in to your specific hardware key (or keys, generally you'd better have backups) or locked in to a particular vendor's ecosystem because their devices are the only ones that can possibly use your encrypted passkey vault.

(WebAuthn neither requires nor standardizes passkey export and import operations, and obviously security keys are built to not let anyone export the cryptographic material from them, that's the point.)

I'm extremely not interested in the security versus availability tradeoff that passkeys make in favour of security. I care far more about preserving availability of access to my variety of online accounts than about nominal high security. So if I'm going to use passkeys at all, I have some requirements :

Linux people: is there a passkeys implementation that does not use physical hardware tokens (software only), is open source, works with Firefox, and allows credentials to be backed up and copied to other devices by hand, without going through some cloud service?

I don't think I'm asking for much, but this is what I consider the minimum for me actually using passkeys. I want to be 100% sure of never losing them because I have multiple backups and can use them on multiple machines.

Apparently KeePassXC more or less does what I want (when combined with its Firefox extension), and it can even export passkeys in a plain text format (well, JSON). However, I don't know if anything else can ingest those plain text passkeys, and I don't know if KeePassXC can be told to only do passkeys with the browser and not try to take over passwords.

(But at least a plain text JSON backup of your passkeys can be imported into another KeePassXC instance without having to try to move, copy, or synchronize a KeePassXC database.)

Normally I would ignore passkeys entirely, but an increasing number of websites are clearly going to require me to use some form of multi-factor authentication, no matter how stupid this is ( cf ), and some of them will probably require passkeys or at least make any non-passkey option very painful. And it's possible that reasonably integrated passkeys will be a better experience than TOTP MFA with my janky minimal setup .

(Of course KeePassXC also supports TOTP, and TOTP has an extremely obvious import process that everyone supports, and I believe KeePassXC will export TOTP secrets if you ask nicely.)

While KeePassXC is okay, what I would really like is for Firefox to support 'memorized passkeys' right along with its memorized passwords (and support some kind of export and import along with it). Should people use them? Perhaps not. But it would put that choice firmly in the hands of the people using Firefox, who could decide on how much security they did or didn't want, not in the hands of websites who want to force everyone to face a real risk of losing their account so that the website can conduct security theater.

(Firefox will never support passkeys this way for an assortment of reasons. At most it may someday directly use passkeys through whatever operating system services expose them, and maybe Linux will get a generic service that works the way I want it to. Nor is Firefox ever going to support 'memorized TOTP codes'.)