Our lives online have been greatly simplified bypassword managers. Using one of them sure beats making a mental note of all your passwords or storing a physical copy that isn’t accessible from anywhere you are. However, your master password for the database of saved credentials now becomes the weakest link in your cybersecurity chain. Companies likeGoogleand1Passwordare pushing for a passwordless future using passkeys instead, and NordPass is the latest service to follow suit.
I can’t imagine a life without passwords, however, theFIDO Alliancebelieves passkeys are the future, and the technology is witnessing widespread adoption.NordPass recently announcedthat all its users can now store, autofill, and share passkeys from the NordPass Vault with the added ease of platform-agnostic cross-device sync.
Presently, NordPass Passkeys is available on desktop, the web vault, the Firefox extension, and the Chrome extension. Support for Safari will roll out later this year. On Android, Google has promised the release of related APIs in August this year, so until then, the passkeys will be unavailable on NordPass’ Android app. Note that using all the methods, you can only save passkeys. For now, they aren’t replacing the master password required to access your NordPass account.
However, passkeys don’t work like passwords, and they offer additional security. When logging in to a service with a password, it checks your entered credential against a server-stored copy to verify your identity. If you were to use a passkey, the server-stored key is incomplete without the key pair on your device, which is further secured by on-device biometric authentication. When both keys are a match, they can together authenticate you on the service. And, there’s no remembering passkeys.
In the future, a transition to Passkeys will spell the end of inadvertent password reuse for convenience, and maybe even two-factor authentication. There’s also a lower chance of “forgetting” passkeys because at a device level, they are tied to your biometrics. Passkeys also save you from potential keylogger attacks, like the one whichleft LastPass’s database vulnerable recently.
Alongside this critical step into the future, NordPass also revealed the company’s ongoing efforts to develop a platform for businesses and online service providers to integrate passkeys. The company is also working on passwordless multifactor authentication for businesses, mostly reliant on biometrics. It is nice to see major password managers willingly supporting a passwordless future.
