Take Control of Your Passwords, 4th Edition

Authenticate Without Passwords

Until recently, most “passwordless” authentication methods were merely convenience features layered on top of passwords. Behind the scenes, you still had to have a password for nearly every site and service, even if you never saw or typed it. (Even magic links, described earlier in Magic Links, sometimes fall into this category.) And the truly passwordless authentication methods that did exist relied on special hardware, making them useless for most people and situations.

A couple of years ago, a real solution finally emerged. I could not be happier to report that the very smart people at the world’s top technology companies devised a technology called passkeys that is now in wide use and can be deployed almost ...