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How does big tech exert control over your usage of WebAuthn?


By enabling relying parties to blacklist or whitelist the devices their users are allowed to use.

It’s one more brick in the wall preventing general-purpose computing. Want to authenticate to Banana Computers? Well, you have to use one of their oDevices, because they will not let you use a RoboPhone to store your passkeys.


You seem to be thinking of attestation, which is not a thing anymore with at least Apple's and Google's implementation. (They both had it for their non-synchronizing device-bound authenticators, but have heavily or even entirely rolled that back in favor of passkeys.)

And since any solution excluding either of these is a non-starter, ironically the passkey push has made WebAuthN more open when it comes to client choice.

So while I agree that Apple and Google not allowing passkey exports (yet; I am cautiously optimistic that they'll eventually be pushed to offer that too) runs the risk of locking in non-sophisticated users, the future is looking very bright for everybody posting here at least.


Yeah, you're missing the point of why attestation is in the spec in the first place.

Show me a widely available service that filters authenticators based on attestation attributes?




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