Unpacking Passkeys Pwned: Possibly the most specious research in decades

Don’t believe everything you read—especially when it’s part of a marketing pitch designed to sell security services.

The latest example of the runaway hype that can come from such pitches is research published today by SquareX, a startup selling services for securing browsers and other client-side applications. It claims, without basis, to have found a “major passkey vulnerability” that undermines the lofty security promises made by Apple, Google, Microsoft, and thousands of other companies that have enthusiastically embraced passkeys.

Ahoy, face-palm ahead

“Passkeys Pwned,” the attack described in the research, was demonstrated earlier this month in a Defcon presentation. It relies on a malicious browser extension, installed in an earlier social engineering attack, that hijacks the process for creating a passkey for use on Gmail, Microsoft 365, or any of the other thousands of sites that now use the alternative form of authentication.

Behind the scenes, the extension allows a keypair to be created and binds it to the legitimate gmail.com domain, but the keypair is created by the malware and controlled by the attacker. With that, the adversary has access to cloud apps that organizations use for their most sensitive operations.

“This discovery breaks the myth that passkeys cannot be stolen, demonstrating that ‘passkey stealing’ is not only possible, but as trivial as traditional credential stealing,” SquareX researchers wrote in a draft version of Thursday’s research paper sent to me. “This serves as a wake up call that while passkeys appear more secure, much of this perception stems from a new technology that has not yet gone through decades of security research and trial by fire.”