After 11 years of life, Google Authenticator has added cloud backups for OTP keys in version 6.0.

Google Security Blog: Google Authenticator now supports Google Account synchronization

This is surprising news to me, because historically Authenticator had no way to backup keys by design. Here's a 2017 quote from a Google engineer who maintains Authenticator:

There is by design NO account backups in any of the apps. ^[source]

This design choice always made sense to me, as the point of 2FA is that you've got (1) something you know, and (2) something you have. The second factor should be tied to a physical device. If you lose the physical device, the second factor should be gone, and you'll need to use one of those 10-ish backup codes that we all definitely keep somewhere safe. I'm quite befuddled that Google is reversing this design choice and walking back their previously strong, security-centric design for the sake of user convenience in the case of a lost phone. I used to advise my friends and family to choose Google Authenticator over Authy for this specific reason.

If you want further reading, here's a PCWorld article with an altogether different tone than Google's announcement: Google Authenticator’s long-awaited cloud 2FA feature carries hidden risk

I saw all the hype about Google's new passkey rollout on Hacker News and Ars Technica in the past month, and have even read an article stating that, paraphrased, "I should start using passkeys immediately, even if the tech is not all the way there yet."

Some questions:

• Are you using passkeys currently? Which provider?
• Is there a fear of vendor lock-in (looking at you, Apple) or ditching the product in the future (looking at you, Google)?
• Any other concerns I should be aware of, e.g. what happens if my phone gets run over by a bulldozer?

lou's post here resonated with me and my attempts to get my family to use better security practices (i.e. 2FA, password managers). They're very difficult to wrap your brain around to the average user, and they have the ability to create catastrophic failstates if used incorrectly. Furthermore, even when they work well, they can still be kind of clunky (different sites use different methods; writing down/printing recovery codes feels like a dated solution alongside other tech-forward things).

Also, outside of this, password requirements are their own bugbear, with nearly every site having different criteria. Even as someone who uses a password generator and manager on the regular, I still have to adjust the password creation criteria to do things like fit character limits or specific requirements (and don't get me started on forced resets!). I totally get why so many people reuse passwords, or have a default one that they sort of modify as needed to fit a given site's needs.

From my (admittedly super limited) perspective of a lay user: usernames, passwords, 2FA and the whole stack seems like something that's suffering under the technical debt of decades' worth of web development and networking. It seems like things have inched forward and many new layers have been added to address emergent problems, but the whole system gives a sort of barely-held-together-by-tape feel.

What if we could use what we know now and redesign things from the ground up? If we could start fresh, today, what might username authentication look like beyond the usual username/password combos that we're so used to?

I'm interested in any ideas -- not necessarily just feasible ones.

Also, despite me being the one prompting this thread, don't feel the need to simplify technical explanations or anything. I'm mostly interested in lurking and seeing what all you very smart techy people have to say about the topic. :)