We had originally planned to go all-in on passkeys for ONCE/Campfire, and we built the early authentication system entirely around that. It was not a simple setup! Handling passkeys properly is surprisingly complicated on the backend, but we got it done. Unfortunately, the user experience kinda sucked, so we ended up ripping it all out...
It uses asymmetric cryptography. You sign a login request with the locally stored private key and the service verifies the signature with their stored public key. The PIN on your device is used to unlock access to the private key to sign the login request.
So isn’t the pin now the weakest link and shorter than a password
Typically in most situations where a PIN is used on a modern device, it is not just the number you enter but some kind of hardware backing that is limited to the local device and also does things like rate limiting attempts.