TechScape: Apple, Google and Microsoft are about to make passwords a thing of the past

theguardian.com:

What if you never had to type in a password again? Imagine. An international day of celebration. Children dancing in the streets. Soldiers laying down their arms and hugging tearfully across the battlefield.

Or, at least, a mild improvement in your daily life. That’s what Apple, Google and Microsoft are offering, with a fairly rare triple announcement that the three tech giants are all adopting the Fido standard and ushering in a passwordless future. The standard replaces usernames and passwords with ‘passkeys’, log-in information stored directly on your device and only uploaded to the website when matched with biometric authentication like a selfie or fingerprint. From Apple’s announcement:

Users will sign in through the same action that they take multiple times each day to unlock their devices, such as a simple verification of their fingerprint or face, or a device PIN. This new approach protects against phishing and sign-in will be radically more secure when compared to passwords and legacy multi-factor technologies such as one-time passcodes sent over SMS.

The three companies will roll out Fido support “over the course of the coming year”. The Fido2 standard is actually already public, and some companies support it already, largely for internal authentication. But the standard has long lacked the final step necessary for ubiquity: making it easy to get started.

That’s what this latest announcement is about. With the help of the platform owners, users will be able to sync their Fido “passkeys”, without needing to log in fresh on each new device. That takes it from a service that is nice addition to passwords, to one that can be fully used to replace them.

Ease of use is only part of the reason for the switch. Passkeys,