Beyond the Trust Boundary: A Critical Reassessment of the FIDO2 Threat Model
A critical reassessment of the FIDO2 threat model finds that security guarantees break down at trust boundaries beyond cryptography, questioning the 'secure by design' assumption enterprises place on passkey deployments.
Summary written by editorial AI · Source link below
arXiv:2609.03789v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: FIDO2/WebAuthn has been widely deployed as a phishing-resistant authentication scheme. Because FIDO2 relies on public-key cryptography and hardware-backed authenticators, its security is often assumed to be guaranteed by design, provided that the cryptographic implementation is correct. In this work, we critically reassess the FIDO2 threat model and show that several commonly assumed security properties do not hold under realistic deployment condi
Editorial Analysis
Many European enterprises are accelerating passkey adoption; this research reveals that FIDO2's security relies on trust-boundary assumptions that may not hold in real deployments.
Conduct a threat-model review of your FIDO2/passkey rollout focusing on non-cryptographic trust assumptions before completing organisation-wide deployment.
Our passkey rollout assumes FIDO2 is secure by design—new research shows trust-boundary gaps that warrant a targeted review before full deployment.
Forward-looking interpretation drafted by editorial AI under human review — not a reproduction of the source. See methodology.
External link — opens at arXiv Crypto & Security in a new tab.
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