Heh, I'm working on a blog post about this very topic. Passkeys are ... weird. There's a lot of potential for gatekeeping, where websites can indeed require you to use device-bound passkeys through device attestation, and where becoming a vendor requires interacting with the fido alliance....
I would say "I'm sure the mean well", but given that parties like Yubico benefit from not getting more competitors, the cynic in me is a bit worried.
Yeah, I wouldn't say that. It's clear from their public comments[1,2,3] that the spec authors don't believe the private key actually belongs to the user to do what they want with. They see services restricting what users may do with their own logins as a feature of Passkeys. It's really a shame it went in this direction. Replacing passwords with an easy-to-use keypair auth system would be a massive security improvement. But the Passkey ecosystem is poisoned at this point. Unless they remove the client ID & attestation anti-features, it should be considered a proprietary big tech protocol.
[1] Threatening an open-source passkey client with server-side bans because they don't implement passkey storage on the client device in the way the spec authors prefer. https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc/issues/10406
[3] While writing an article about this on my website, I actually emailed the two involved spec authors on the above issue, politely asking how their interpretation of the Passkey spec could possibly be compatible with open source software. Neither replied.
It is particularly odd in the case of open-source clients (or indeed any client that runs outside of some very locked down hardware) because a) there's nothing that prevents the user exfiltrating keys anyway, and b) attestation also means relatively little for such an implementation.
Yes, the problems are obvious and the spec authors definitely know & understand the issues. Their refusal to have a public discussion about it indicates they just don't care, and their maintenance of a "naughty client list" shows Passkeys are intentionally hostile to user freedom.
I would say "I'm sure the mean well", but given that parties like Yubico benefit from not getting more competitors, the cynic in me is a bit worried.