I swear most people have forgotten what TOTP was used for in the first place - two-factor auth to protect people re-using passwords getting hit by password breaches on other services, people using low complexity passwords, and to protect people’s breeched devices (e.g. computers getting viruses or malware or drive-by credential nabbers that give the attacker access to your credentials in some way). In short, to solve some poor security practices. 2FA via TOPT still solves all of those problems.
Passkeys fix a different problem. On their own as a technology they essentially just increase the quality of a password, while tying that password to a single device. So they fix the problems of re-used passwords, and unsophisticated passwords. But with many implementations they fall back to being single-factor auth - if a user has access to your device, they can use the passkey (with exceptions such as passkeys stored on a physical second-factor like a Yubikey that requires physical approval to use).
TOTP meanwhile requires two devices to be accessed by design.
As myself and most tech-aware users already use unique, sophisticated passwords - they don’t solve a problem for us.
However, if businesses allow passkeys as a simple password alternative, while still allowing TOTP as a second factor, I’d be happy to do so for critical access items (mostly banking). However, I’m not aware of this being the case for any common implementations in major businesses.
Passkeys are just ‘Yubikey without the Yubikey or physical approval’ - pointless to me. False sense of security even.
Maybe? I’d say that TOTP is probably more ‘phishable’ than passkeys - but I doubt there are actual stats on it.
If an end-user is the kind of person that’s fooled by a fake bank website that is on the wrong domain with a sketchy certificate - and approve 2FA requests without much thought - then it is probably likely they’d be fooled by a fake bank website that says, “per our recent updates, [yesterday’s date] is the last date to switch to using an updated web browser. Our bank website is no longer compatible with this web browser, please open one of these browsers [list of any major browser useragent not identified as the current browser] and attempt login again”.
That could either completely bypass their pre-configured bank passkey with legacy login to the fake bank, or the attackers could just pushing them to configure a new passkey to the fake bank on the new browser (the attackers wouls set up a real passkey to the real bank in parallel, using the supplied credentials in the background).
There is certainly proof of concept and examples in the wild of significant cases of people being tricked into approving additional devices with passkeys.