Passkey support continues to grow in the wake of Google’s announcement last week that it would make the passwordless authentication mechanism the default login option for users’ personal Google Accounts.
Google’s momentous announcement arrived alongside the news that Enpass had become the latest password management platform to enable support for passkeys. The update applied to Android 14 users, thanks to the operating system’s new “Credential Manager API” allowing passkeys to be stored locally on a user’s device. And it came just a couple of weeks after Enpass enabled passkey support on iOS.
Enpass has also notably enabled users to sync their passkeys across multiple devices. “Syncing passkeys will become the norm over the next few years, and Enpass users get to be some of the first people to use passkeys this way,” the company said in a blog post.
More recently, this week kicked off with WhatsApp’s decision to launch support for passkeys for its Android users — a significant development given its prominence as a messaging platform. In announcing WhatsApp’s support on X (formerly Twitter), the Meta-owned company framed passkeys as a way for users to “easily and securely log back in” to their accounts.
That was quickly followed by the news of Thales’ partnership with SoyYo, a Colombian startup that offers digital identity services to the financial services sector, on a solution that integrates passkey technology.
Founded in 2019, SoyYo has already developed an identity solution that lets end users save a digital credential on their smartphone, which can then be unlocked with a face scan during interactions with organizations supporting the credential. Now, Thales has helped the company to integrate passkeys through its Gemalto IdCloud solution, delivering both a standard device-bound passkey system and a version that can sync passkeys across multiple devices.
The flurry of activity points to strong momentum for the passkey concept, and a brighter future for everyday cybersecurity. By encouraging a growing number of consumers to embrace passwordless authentication through their mobile devices, the various tech companies enabling support for passkeys are contributing to a safer online environment that is not so reliant on the relatively weak security of passwords.
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October 18, 2023 – by Alex Perala
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