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w3c
webauthn
Bikeshed2018–2026
w3c / webauthn

webauthn

Web Authentication: An API for accessing Public Key Credentials

25Distinct people
40Mentions
1Explicit recommenders
1.5KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Web Authentication: An API for accessing Public Key Credentials

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use was verified in the last source check.

What people are saying

The working group is definitely quite corporate-driven – just look at who's most active in it! – and has made some bad decisions in the past (my favorite example being [1],…

lxgr used a recommendation phrase. One indexed comment matches. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 2:04:58 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year40 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2018-03-26 04:28:28 UTC to 2026-07-16 10:45:11 UTC.

0369122018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments20182019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 1 submissions, 1 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 12 mentions; 0 submissions, 12 comments20222023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 10 mentions; 0 submissions, 10 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 1 submissions, 2 comments2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments. Incomplete calendar period.2026*

* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC211
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC12012
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC10010
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC312
2026 (partial)2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202

From the project README

An excerpt from the repository, fetched Nov 13, 2026.

Read the project’s introduction
Web Authentication Specification This is the repository for the W3C WebAuthn Working Group, producing the draft "Web Authentication" specification. The editor's copy is available at https://w3c.github.io/webauthn/, or in the gh-pages branch of this repository. The current offically published working-draft snapshot is here: https://www.w3.org/TR/webauthn/. The build history is available from the repo Actions tab W3C WebAuthn Blog Web platform tests repository Contributing To materially contribute to this specification, you must meet the requirements outlined in CONTRIBUTING.md. Also, before submitting feedback, please familiarize yourself with our current issues list and review the mailing list discussion. Building the Draft The following are required before continuing: mise Run the following commands to set up your local development environment to work on these specifications: mise setup Formatted HTML for the draft can then be built with the following command: mise build You can use the following command to automatically regenerate the rendered document as you make changes locally, and view the rendered document at http://localhost:8000: mise serve Continuous Integration & Branches https://w3c.github.io/webauthn/ is autopublished from the gh-pages branch on every push to the main branch, using https://github.com/w3c/webauthn/blob/main/.github/workflows/build-validate-publish.yml to configure the autopublishing behavior.
Read the full README on GitHub

What Hacker News says

3 sources
TPMs are also sold separately that which can be plugged in to motherboards, e.g. Gigabyte (https://www.gigabyte.com/us/Motherboard/GC-TPM20-SPI-20) and Asus (https://www.asus.com/Motherboards-Components/Motherboards/Ac...) to name a couple. The article has a couple of other weird faults, too: 1. I'm not sure why the author is complaining about FIDO2 having backwards compatibility with U2F/CTAP1. The article even incorrectly claims FIDO2 is "a 3rd incompatible standard" only to counter-argue the point a few paragraphs below explaining CTAP? People not having to throw away their perfectly fine old devices is a good thing in my book. 2. "All FIDO standards are web-centric and aren’t designed with any other client software in mind" the first part is true, the second part not so much. For example FIDO2 supports silent authentication (no user i
Read the rest
nteraction) while WebAuthn explicitly does not[0]. It also supports the hmac-secret extension[1] which is used for offline authentication with Azure Active Directory[2] and IIRC no WebAuthn browser implementation exposes this extension to web apps. [0]: see e.g. discussion on https://github.com/w3c/webauthn/issues/199 [1]: https://fidoalliance.org/specs/fido-v2.1-rd-20210309/#sctn-h... [2]: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/auth...
In What I Wish I Knew About U2F and Other Hardware MFA Protocols

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