Passkeys in Google Chrome Are Open to Attack, With One Big Caveat
Researchers found a way to bypass Chrome's passkey security and steal the codes directly from the browser of a PC infected by malware.The big reason passkeys are safer is that they can't be stolen, copied, or guessed. There's no way to social engineer a passkey that can then be used remotely. But if the device the passkey is stored on is compromised, that can be a real problem.
- ▪Researchers found a way to bypass Chrome's passkey security and steal the codes directly from the browser of a PC infected by malware.The big reason passkeys are safer is that they can't be stolen, copied, or guessed.
- ▪There's no way to social engineer a passkey that can then be used remotely.
- ▪But if the device the passkey is stored on is compromised, that can be a real problem.
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| Original publisher | PCMag |
| Canonical URL | https://www.pcmag.com/news/passkeys-in-google-chrome-are-open-to-attack-with-one-big-caveat |
| Publication time | Fri, 07 Aug 26 15:39:34 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-08-07T15:50:47.675Z |
| Last seen | 2026-08-07T15:50:47.675Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | y-R9rHE6oxju · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Researchers found a way to bypass Chrome's passkey security and steal the codes directly from the browser of a PC infected by malware.The big reason passkeys are safer is that they can't be stolen, copied, or guessed. There's no way to social engineer a passkey that can then be used remotely. But if the device the passkey is stored on is compromised, that can be a real problem. In this case, researchers from Palo Alto Networks' Unit 42 were able to read enough plaintext data from Google's Password Manager to manipulate the cloud authenticator and access whatever the passkey protected.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at PCMag.
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