Passkeys in Windows 10 are broken

[FlyingPenguin]

I've only just started using Passkeys for a few, unimportant accounts that I need to access regularly. Web sites are making it a nuisance to just use a password anymore.

I have only been using Passkeys on my Win11 Surface Pro tablet. Yesterday I tried to store one on my Win10 desktop and wound up deep down an ugly rat hole.

Bottom line, Win11 has a native, built in Passkey store, in addition to an option to store them in your Microsoft account. Windows 10 has no built in passkey store, and can only use your Microsoft account (no thanks, not going to use an MS login for Windows, nor am I going to trust MS with my passwords in the cloud). But if you don't have a Microsoft account associated, then it just fails by asking you to "Insert your USB security device" whenever it tries to save or recall a Passkey. This is despite the fact that I am using Sticky Password for my password storage, which does itself support Passkeys.

Google "passkey usb security device" and you will find hundreds of posts about this, with no solutions that work. Even worse, once you try to use Passkeys once, your browser will try to automatically get a Passkey for a website from Windows after that, and give you that security device popup, and make it hard to bypass and use a password.

I was forced to disable Passkeys in Firefox via the about:config settings, so I could just use a password like normal.

Since I am really in no rush to jump on the Passkey bandwagon anyway, I'll wait until I find a solution, or I am forced to upgrade to Win11 on my workstation. Since I don't trust any password manager or browser to store my really important logins (like banking), it's only for low security sites I store them for, like this BBS, retail store accounts, etc.

[Executioner]

You mentioned password managers. I'm currently using Bitwarden for logging into sites I use. I don't trust the one from FireFox or any other browser including saving payment info. How stupid is that?

[FlyingPenguin]

Yeah BitWarden is good. It's open source. But again, I put nothing of any real importance in a password manager. It's all just BS accounts.

[Losbot]

I keep all 415 usernames and passwords in my trusty Notepad, under the filename "DoNotOpen.txt" so that if someone sees that, they won't open it of course. No worries about cloud break-ins.

[Pugsley]

Probably should have called it ReadMe.txt