Show HN: Open Passkey – open-source passkey auth with free "backendless" host

10 points

2 months ago

I, like Andrej Karpathy, became super frustrated by how annoying it was to deploy projects that were previously an absolute joy to make with Claude Code. That is why I made open-passkey, an MIT licensed passkey repo with support for 33 languages and frameworks (examples included) that makes adding simple secure auth to a project easy.

We are also releasing gateway (https://gateway.locke.id) a "backendless" hosted auth server that frontend apps can consume for free so that you can ship a React or Angular app using a CDN like Netlify without needing to configure a server at all. We are willing to freely share the resources of an AWS t.large instance which should easily support millions of accounts & sessions. This decision was made to improve our velocity when it comes to shipping small apps (it should go without saying that this is not designed for large apps).

Open-passkey prioritizes post-quantum algorithms, though they are not supported by browsers yet. On top of Gateway, we also built a simple end-to-end encrypted key value store modeled after localStorage. A simple setItem() and getItem() API that uses PRF with passkeys to store encrypted values on gateway with zero config. This, again, was made to improve our velocity to securely add API keys and stuff to frontend apps without needing to pay for a server to host. Obviously gateway is completely optional and exporting out your users public keys is supported with rp_id verification via domain TXT records.

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