On Thursday, May 5, World Password Day, tech giants pledged to allow passwordless login on all platforms, whether on mobile phones, computers or browsers, within the next few years.
This means that password-free access will reach all major hardware platforms in the near future, including iOS and Android mobile operating systems, Google Chrome, Edge and Safari browsers, and computer operating systems such as those of Microsoft and Apple.
Before the technological and information revolution that began to spread during the nineties of the last century, there was no great importance for passwords; Many of those born during this period did not know that passwords existed except in things such as safes that only a small group of people owned.
Today, the password has become a basic requirement, and an urgent necessity that exists in the hands of the young before the old; Who among us does not put a password and a code to lock his phone to protect it from intruders, not to mention our need to protect our accounts through social media and e-mail, whether we use them for entertainment in our personal lives or for our business and commerce.
Ease of use
“While we design our products to be more user-friendly, we also design them to be private and secure,” said Kurt Knight, Apple’s senior director of platform product marketing. We work with industry players to create new, more secure login methods that offer better protection, and eliminating password vulnerabilities is central to our commitment to building products that provide maximum security and provide a transparent user experience, all with the aim of maintaining the safety of users’ personal information.”
The passwordless login process allows users to choose their phones as the primary authentication devices for apps, websites and other digital services, as Google detailed in a blog post on Thursday. Unlocking the phone will then be sufficient to log into the web services without having to enter a password, and this will be possible through the use of a unique encrypted code called a passkey that is shared between the phone and the website.
By making logins conditional on a sensory device, the idea is that users will benefit from both simplicity and security. The absence of a password means that there is no obligation to remember your login details for the Services or that security is compromised by reusing the same password in several places. Equally, a non-password-based system would make it much more difficult for hackers looking to steal login details and hack remotely since logging in requires access to a physical device, and in theory, hacking attacks would be when users were directed to a fake website To enter the password and then steal it is much more difficult and this process of riding will become more difficult as well.
Platform Compatibility
Vasu Jekal, Microsoft’s Vice President of Security and Compliance, Identity and Privacy, emphasized the degree of interoperability between the platforms. “With the passkeys on your mobile phone, you are able to log into an app or service on almost every device, regardless of which platform or browser the device is running,” said Jackal. For example, users can log into the Google Chrome browser running on Microsoft Windows using a passkey on an Apple device.”
Cross-platform functionality is made possible by a standard called FIDO (Fast Identity Online), which uses public-key cryptography principles to enable non-password-dependent and multi-transactional authentication in multiple contexts. The user’s phone can store a unique passkey in compliance with the Online Express ID standard, and will share it with the website for authentication only when the phone is unlocked. According to Google’s post, it is also possible to easily sync passkeys to a new device from a cloud backup in case the phone is lost or stolen.
Although many popular applications already have support for Quick Identity online authentication, they require a password login on first use before setting Quick Identity, meaning that users are still at risk of cyberattacks that lead to their passwords being intercepted or I stole it while I was in the process. The advantage of the new procedures is that they can dispense with the first requirement for the password.