Apple's AI Can Now Change Your Passwords. What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

sspeckx about 4 hours ago 40 commentsRead Article on kylereddoch.me

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Discussion (40 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

zerobees•about 2 hours ago

This article appears to be 100% AI. I guess there's some irony that a company ships an AI feature and someone else uses AI to come up with criticisms of that feature. But the article... doesn't actually say anything?

It's just full of weird, generic short-sentence LLMisms ("Detection is observation.", "Changing the password is authority.", "The security benefit is real.", "That is a meaningful improvement.", "This is not just text generation. It is an agent taking action with a sensitive credential.", ...). It doesn't offer any insights into the actual architecture that Apple came up with, whatever it might be. It doesn't propose a better design, other than a bunch of super-generic things that apply to every single software project ever ("The system should verify the exact website and account before filling or changing anything.", "This feature deserves focused adversarial testing during the beta period."). So... it's upvoted just because the title mentions Apple and AI?

Animats•about 3 hours ago

Back in 1984, I wrote the original "obvious password detector".[1] It just checks whether a password has English language trigram stats. This prevents dictionary attacks.

Everything is so much more complicated now.

[1] https://www.animats.com/source/obvious/obvious.c

dewey•about 3 hours ago

There's this standard that is being worked on by the people working on the Passwords app at Apple (They are active on Mastodon, and often talking about that) which will probably be helpful for this feature too: https://www.w3.org/TR/change-password-url/

thallavajhula•about 3 hours ago

Thank you for this resource. I'm reading up on this spec and it seems like an interesting direction.

For anybody else trying to know what else the .well-known URI can hold: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Well-known_URI#List_of_well-kn...

SquareWheel•about 3 hours ago

I know that an uncommon name needed to be chosen, but something about the hyphenated /.well-known/ just turns me off.

I'd have really preferred another term: registered, reserved, defined, meta -- or really anything else.

genghisjahn•about 3 hours ago

got any of them mastodon links?

thdr•about 2 hours ago

I guess they're referring to Ricky Mondello https://hachyderm.io/@rmondello

AshamedCaptain•about 3 hours ago

Call me when it can _delete the account_ from all those websites, which is likely the primary reason the user has not updated the password yet.

flyingshelf•about 2 hours ago

The app already proposed to change passwords and lead the users onto the website to do it. Now it can just do it autonomously (reportedly.)

At any rate this is just the first step towards a first-party agentic OS.

pokstad•about 2 hours ago

I’ve had the iOS password app think that it changed my password, when it did not, and then lose my old password.

tcoff91•about 2 hours ago

It doesn't retain all previous passwords??? that's crazy.

pokstad•about 2 hours ago

It does now but didn’t always: https://austinmacworks.com/updated-passwords-app-adds-histor...

I should also add this is only if you have iOS 26 or newer.

andrewmg•about 2 hours ago

It retains past passwords. Open the entry in the Passwords app and then scroll down to "View History" button.

nikisweeting•about 2 hours ago

Very curious if they're implementing browser driving themselves or using an off-the-shelf library like stagehand, browser-use, etc. to drive the DOM. Hopefully they open source it if it's in Swift.

A11y-tree alone is not enough for many sites because lots of auth stuff happens in OOPIF frames that need special handling/stitching/interactive element filtering.

There's also the issues of many captchas around auth stuff being implemented using canvas elements (that are hard to instrument for browser agents without relying on CUA). Can their on-device 3B model really handle accurate CUA driving? I guess we'll see...

doodlebugging•about 2 hours ago

I wonder whether the AI generated password that you allow to be created on your iPhone in the Passwords app can be recovered and added to whatever password manager you might be using on Windows or Linux desktop.

It seems like this is a great way to lock oneself out of access to an account on some of the devices that they own that do not have access to the Passwords data storage.

I can see where this can be a benefit in helping users secure their accounts with stronger passwords but I think that there is a lot of potential for this to become a real problem.

vablings•about 3 hours ago

This could have nuclear level consequences. Imagine somehow your keychain is compromised. Using a change password URL means an attacker could literally lock you out of every account at the same time

john_strinlai•about 2 hours ago

this only really changes things for obscure sites. there's already automation readily available for all the popular social media, banks, crypto sites, etc.

drob518•about 4 hours ago

Yea, I saw that during the WWDC keynote and physically cringed. As the article says, what could go wrong?

coldtea•about 2 hours ago

Nothing much different than e.g. Chrome suggesting a password and saving it?

drob518•about 2 hours ago

This is not that. This is an agent autonomously navigating through the website to change your password. You don’t even need to be navigated to the site. The app gives you a list of sites with insecure passwords and you just hit a button labeled “Change” or something like that and it kicks off a process to change it. If there’s was a standard API for changing passwords, then sure. But this is far beyond just suggesting a strong password and offering to store it for you when you are navigating the site yourself. And given how often THAT simple functionality goes wrong, in my experience, I don’t have a lot of hope that this will work out well. To be clear, that’s not Apple’s fault. Some sites have garbage authentication and password change workflows.

coldtea•about 1 hour ago

>This is not that. This is an agent autonomously navigating through the website to change your password. You don’t even need to be navigated to the site.

I know. What I'm saying is, if you already trust Chrome/Safari/etc with your passwords, even trusting it to come up with one and store it securely and correctly, and it has access to the content you browse (since you're doing it through it), it's not that different from a privacy perspective.

What's gonna happen by automating the change too? It's gonna click the wrong button and delete your account?

cyanydeez•about 3 hours ago

It's good to know Apples not immune from the insecure by design hype machine; just late to the game!

TechRemarker•about 3 hours ago

Yes, also immediately thought of all the endless ways this could go wrong and end with someone losing access to their account, which depending on their account could be trivial or life altering, especially if their loss ends up being someone else's gain. Apple takes baby steps so I'm sure this will be limited in nature and most likely will get delayed until fully tested, but I'd definitely avoid testing during betas (with any real accounts that is).

flyingshelf•about 2 hours ago

This is a great article except the "That can happen for plenty of boring reasons" list. Almost each of those reasons is completely unrelated to AI and can happen even if you attempt the change 100% manually with or without a password manager.

throwaway85825•about 3 hours ago

People already have a hard time remembering passwords without them being automatically changed.

Schiendelman•about 3 hours ago

You should not be trying to remember your passwords. That's what autofill is for, so you can use passwords that are actually secure.

throwaway85825•about 2 hours ago

I'm trying, but its not so easy to convince people I know.

Schiendelman•about 2 hours ago

Let Apple change their passwords so they have to use the manager! :D

mikestew•about 2 hours ago

I can remember two passwords: the one that gets me into my laptop, and the one that gets me into my password manager. And this feature requires one to use Apple's default password manager, ergo...

And I shouldn't remember the first one, I just haven't gotten 'round to setting up the Yubikey on the laptop just yet.

thewebguyd•about 2 hours ago

That's the point of the password manager. You shouldn't be remembering individual passwords, they should largely be random.

Petersipoi•about 2 hours ago

If you're trying to remember passwords, you're already doing it wrong

john_strinlai•about 3 hours ago

people should not really be remembering any password other than the master password for their password manager.

this also requires the passwords app to even function. so this should be a non-issue.

dotcoma•about 3 hours ago

Can it be turned off ?

eblume•about 3 hours ago

As per the demo, in order for Siri to rotate your passwords "for you", you have to open the Password app, go to their dashboard on weak or exposed passwords, and click a button asking it to rotate your password account by account.

So yes. It's off by default. You have to affirmatively use the feature. (This is purely based on what I remember from the demo, mind you. I have not used the feature.)

srik•about 3 hours ago

This one is getting a lot of undue flak. Not only does it require explicit confirmation, it’s also contained entirely within the passwords app which already has access to all your passwords because you chose to trust it.

If you use this app, open it and look at how many entries fall under the “security” section. Everyday another password is compromised and added to the list, just too many to keep up. So, albeit apprehensively, I for one appreciate this feature.

micromacrofoot•about 3 hours ago

I already let 1Password generate all my passwords, so as long as they're just invoking tools with AI rather than having it attempt manually, it doesn't seem like such a big deal?

hmokiguess•about 2 hours ago

https://xkcd.com/2044/

ThejaCH•about 3 hours ago

I mean isn't it either to complex to implement or not a good implementation kind off thing?

A good chunk of people do use devices other than apple eco system one's and if they try to login and then suddenly, you can't!

Schiendelman•about 3 hours ago

If they already use devices outside the Apple ecosystem, they're not using the Passwords app, or they're using the plugins that get you access to it in other ecosystems.

TylerE•about 3 hours ago

Isn't that a completely defeating attitude? V1.0 is rarely anything close to perfect.