Re: [webauthn] Add new isPasskeyPlatformAuthenticatorAvailable() method (#1901)

There is consensus in the FIDO Alliance. The agreed-upon definition there (see https://fidoalliance.org/passkeys/#faq) is that a **passkey** is a _discoverable FIDO credential_, without further qualification:

>WHAT IS A PASSKEY?
>[...]
>From a technical standpoint, passkeys are “discoverable” FIDO credentials for passwordless authentication. [...]

That said, there still is clearly a lot of confusion about the term. I think one can argue both ways here: on the one hand, adding a "passkey" definition to WebAuthn might only confuse matters even more. On the other hand, repeating FIDO's "passkey" definition in WebAuthn could help spread and solidify that definition and help the wider community converge on one meaning of the term.

I'm not sure on which side I stand in that. Perhaps it is wise to avoid introducing the term. Do we really need it? I'm really not opposed to naming the method `isUserVerifyingPlatformAuthenticatorOrHybridTransportAvailable()` for example. Long names are only a problem if you need to type them all the time, which is very unlikely you'll need to do with this one.

-- 
GitHub Notification of comment by emlun
Please view or discuss this issue at https://github.com/w3c/webauthn/pull/1901#issuecomment-1593125518 using your GitHub account


-- 
Sent via github-notify-ml as configured in https://github.com/w3c/github-notify-ml-config

Received on Thursday, 15 June 2023 13:58:06 UTC