Is the faceID/fingerprint only needed for setup or every time?
I can „forget“ a PIN in case someone tries to force me to send funds, don’t have that way out with biometrics.
I’m excited to work with Praveen of Cove Wallet on a new open standard for Bitcoin wallet cloud backup using Passkeys - no passwords, no key server trust.
Today wallets like BitKey provide a seedless UX with good redundancy but they require hardware. For spending wallets or users that want to start without hardware our proposal provides a compelling UX - Just do FaceID/TouchID to sync a Passkey to your password manager and done.
It’s an improvement over Photon since there is no key server to run for the wallet vendor and no PIN to remember for users (and no email/phone for PIN reset). The wallet just needs to regularly do a health check to verify the Passkey in your password manager can decrypt the cloud backup.
Let us know what you think. The goal is to develop this into an open standard that any mobile signer can adopt. Link below 👇
https://praveenperera.com/blog/passkey-prf-bitcoin-wallet-backup
Discussion
Good point. Users can disable biometrics for their password manager and it will prompt for the device passcode instead.
The passkey authentication flow is only needed during setup (backup/restore) and health checks.
During daily use, the seed is stored on the mobile wallet though. So standard security features like a PIN can still be set by the wallet ofc.