I use Bitwarden and have the plug-in installed on the Brave desktop browser both on my Windows machine at home and on my Linux machine at the office.
I recently created a passkey for my Google account, saved it in Bitwarden and can use it for logging in on my Windows machine just fine. However, this doesn’t work on my Linux machine.
The Bitwarden vaults of the two machines are in sync - if I examine my Google account in Bitwarden on the Linux machine, I see that it has a saved passkey, despite that I’ve saved it on my Windows machine. Still, that passkey doesn’t seem to be used - an attempt to log into Google behaves as if I don’t have a passkey.
I do understand that there two kinds of passkeys - those that can be synced and those that cannot be - but had the impression that the Google passkeys are of the first kind?
Well, something is stored in Bitwarden’s vault, because when I view the entry for my Google account, it has an entry for “Passkey” and a creation date. This is both on my Windows and Linux machines, so clearly this information is synced, as I said. I can’t see the actual passkey, of course - only that one is present.
This is checked on both machines.
This list is empty on both machines. If the domain is listed there, Bitwarden won’t try to submit the passkey, even if it has one saved. Instead, it would refer to the device’s own methods (biometric, etc.) for this.
Again, this is not a hardware passkey. The two vaults are in sync. Both have the passkey. But on the Linux machine, I am not offered to log in with it.
I have a similar issue sometimes with Passkeys on my Linux machine. Try this: open the google webpage using the link in the browser extension, then wait a little bit - maybe 10-15 seconds - before trying to log in. That may help.
I don’t know. I have created a test passkey at passkeys.io but I don’t have access to my office machine right now; it would take a few days before I could check.
Configure passkey login for the community. I have found that is one of the sites that works best with passkeys and serves as a good playground to understand how they work and to fix “system-wide” issues.
Google does have some oddness, but I am generally able to share/use its passkey between my windows devices.
This didn’t work even on my Windows machine but while fixing this problem, the main issue managed to resolve itself too.
Turns out, the URL in Autofill options → Website was no longer valid - apparently, Google had changed something. I edited it down to just the domain part (accounts.google.com) and, after syncing, I can now log in with a passkey both from my Windows and from my Linux machine.
I don’t know for sure whether the invalid URL was the cause of the problem or whether the problem solved itself because some time had passed while I was editing the URL, so I am hesitant to mark this as a solution. Thanks for your help, though.
Sidenote: I just changed the title from “Are Google passkeys not synced?” to “A passkey in my vault doesn’t work on my Linux machine” as it does represent the issue better.
