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Authentication: Death to the Password?
90 percent of us are worried that our passwords will be hacked? Despite that, we tend to be very bad at managing the passwords we choose securely. Passwords like ‘password’ and ‘123456789’ still are favorites. A study by Ponemon found that on average a single password is used across five different accounts, and nearly 60 percent of all passwords contain parts of the person’s name or birthday. And when we need a new password nearly three-quarters of us just change or add a single letter to the previous one.
The first Thursday in May every year is “World Password Day”. Last year, to celebrate the ‘event’, the big tech giants (Apple, Google, and Microsoft) introduced the idea of a “passkey” as a possible replacement for the standard password.
Passkeys will be built into computer security systems and authenticate using biometric data. For example you might authenticate your use of an app using Touch ID or Face ID. A digital key is stored on your machine so that the next time you authenticate you will be able to access the application. Your passkey can be synced across all the devices that you commonly use.
The passkey technology is built on top of an industry standard known as the W3C Web Authentication API and has received support from Apple, Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft.
Daren Adler, VP at Apple, described a major advantage of passkey, saying that “passkeys can’t be phished since the Passkey never leaves your devices. Hackers can’t trick you into sharing it on a fake website. And passkeys can’t be leaked because nothing secret is kept on a web server.”
Apple has already adopted passkey. It will be up to other tech vendors to modify their software to enable support. Passkeys might be the next-generation authentication technology that can supplant the password.
