On the other hand: what passwords have going for them is that they’re very intuitive, everyone knows how they work, people have been using them since time immemorial, and you can choose where you store them and who you share them with. Keep this in mind.

What’s neat about TOTP is that it doesn’t rely on text messages or email or even the internet at all. Your authenticator software simply generates a random-looking number every 30 seconds based on the current time (and a random starting number called a “seed” or a “key” that is unique to you), and this is all that a website needs to verify you’re you.

Similar to passwords, TOTP can be stored the way the user want.

In fact there are many different things called “passkeys” and the FIDO Alliance has intentionally named all of them the same thing. I believe this was done in order to deliberately confuse users and encourage them not to look too closely at the fine text.

There are multiple properties for a passkeys:

• copyable or not copyable
• transferable or not transferable
• hardware-backed or software-backed
• user present or non-user-present
• user verified or non-user-verified
• attested or non-attested: They’re called authenticator data flags in the WebAuthn standard.

A platform can now say: "sorry, we only accept the User-Present User-Verified Non-Copyable Hardware-Backed varieties of passkey here" or just: "unfortunately your passkey isn’t secure enough; download our app.” But it’s an open standard, isn’t it?

Attested passkeys is the glitch (authenticator data flag AT, if you were wondering). This is the feature that means you no longer get to make the calls about your passkeys. "Critically, remote attestation requires the co-operation of your cryptoprocessor, your passkey manager software, your device’s operating system, and your device’s firmware to all pass the remote attestation check".

My expectation is that the industry will start off with very few constraints on your passkeys, and gradually add more and more, not all at the same time, but staggered on different sites, and then in a few years people will forget that they were ever offered a choice in which security measures they want to enable on their passkey.

For intelligence agencies, and for corporations like Microsoft, Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon – giving you convenience and security is likely not their primary goal. I think they have an entirely ulterior motive. They can use passkeys to prevent you from running unapproved software.