Microsoft has announced support for third-party passkey managers in Windows 11: Third-party passkey manager support - Windows apps | Microsoft Learn
Does Bitwarden have plans to support this in the near term? That would be really neat, because I feel like lack syncability of passkeys across platforms is a major issue that needs to be solved for it to really take off as a viable alternative to passwords.
Here it is even mentioned, that they work together with the FIDO alliance, Bitwarden and others on this: Passkeys on Windows: Authenticate seamlessly with passkey providers - Windows Developer Blog
But unfortunately, I don’t know more about it (including when that change will come to Windows 11?)…
Ugh, reading the Microsoft documentation for this feature makes me fear that the passkey UX will become even worse than it already is. Now, instead of the Bitwarden browser extension being able to directly intercept passkey creation/authorization requests, we would have to first click through a “Windows Security” prompt.
Also, Windows will now force the User Verification to be done using Windows Hello, instead of allowing the third-party passkey manager to implement a User Verification method for passkeys stored there.
All that was really needed is a way to disable all passkey handling by the Windows OS, so that we could skip all of the unnecessary “Windows Security” prompts (when using Yubikeys, for example). Instead, what seems to have been developed is a framework for inserting even more Windows OS hooks into the handling of passkeys by other parties.
Passkeys are —and will remain — a dumpster fire.
I am able to use Passkeys, via the Bitwarden browser extension, on Windows 11 today using Brave.
I do not have a Microsoft account, only a local account.
You’re able to use them in the browser, yes, but if Bitwarden were to use the passkeys API in Windows they could also be used to authenticate in other apps.
