Apple reveals more on its plans to kill off passwords for good
Apple wants passwordless authentication mechanism to work on non-Apple devices as well
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Appleannounced its plans for a newpasswordless authenticationmechanism that will allow customers to use Face ID and Touch ID-based account authentication.
TheiPhonemaker announced its move towards a more secure and easy-to-use authentication mechanism at itsWWDC 2021event.
The new mechanism is being introduced in the form of passkeys iniCloud Keychain, and is based on the WebAuthn standard, which offers passwordless, biometrics-based authentication.
Explaining the feature,Apple’s Garrett Davidson said when users create an account using a passkey, there is no password to deal with since theApple deviceswill themselves handle the generation and storage of the unique passkey.
He added that passkeys are end-to-end encrypted andiCloudKeychain helps sync them across a users’ Apple devices.
Better than 2FA
Davidson argued that thanks to its design and theiCloudKeychain implementation, using passkeys will be easier and more secure than most two-factor (2FA) and multi-factor authentication (MFA) solutions.
“In most cases, it just takes a single tap or click to sign in. And they’re stronger than most password-plus-second-factor solutions out there today, thanks to the combined security of WebAuthn and iCloud Keychain,” said Davidson.
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In macOS Monterey andiOS 15, the passkeys in iCloud Keychain feature is being released as a technology preview and is off by default, that is designed to help developers explore and test the feature.
Davidson also added that although passkeys currently only work with Apple devices, the company is talking to partners at FIDO and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to devise a solution that enables passwordless authentication on non-Apple devices as well.
Via9to5Mac
With almost two decades of writing and reporting on Linux, Mayank Sharma would like everyone to think he’sTechRadar Pro’sexpert on the topic. Of course, he’s just as interested in other computing topics, particularly cybersecurity, cloud, containers, and coding.
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