Passkeys are widely promoted as a phishing-resistant alternative to passwords, but new research from Palo Alto Networks’ Unit 42 shows that malware already running on a Windows PC can abuse Google Password Manager to silently authenticate into passkey-protected websites — no fingerprint, no PIN, no prompt shown to the victim.
The researchers named the three attack paths Pass-ta-key, Silver Pass-ta-key, and Golden Pass-ta-key. The strongest of the three targets the 32-byte Security Domain Secret (SDS) that Chrome uses to decrypt synced passkey private keys stored in the cloud. An unprivileged process can read credential metadata from Chrome’s LevelDB folder under %LocalAppData%\Google\Chrome\User Data, and the subsequent steps let an attacker install an attacker-controlled user-verification key or obtain a valid authentication assertion — all silently. Because Google Password Manager syncs passkeys across devices, the two more powerful paths can give an attacker reusable access from their own environment after the initial breach. None of the attacks break the underlying cryptography; they exploit how Chrome stores device state, handles re-enrollment, and (in some cases) whether the site being logged into bothers to verify that a human was present.
The report, published August 3, 2026, does not describe any in-the-wild exploitation. No CVEs were assigned and no specific Chrome version was identified as the cutoff. All three paths require malware to already be running on the victim’s machine — this is a post-compromise technique, not a way to break into a system in the first place. Google has not issued a public advisory.