Thanks to passkeys, you may not need to remember a password ever again.
Apple thinks 249 of my passwords need attention. Some of them have been reused. Some of them have been caught up in data breaches. Some are just bad passwords.
That’s why, for the past 11 years, a group called the FIDO Alliance has been working to kill passwords — or at least make us less reliant on them. FIDO, short for Fast IDentity Online, wants to make signing into your accounts not only more secure but also, as the name implies, faster and easier. Since its members include Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, and other architects of our online experience, the FIDO Alliance is in a position to accomplish this, too.
Whether you’ve realized it or not, FIDO’s efforts have already transformed the way you sign into everything online. You may have noticed a few years ago, for instance, that a lot more sites started requiring something called multifactor authentication, which adds an extra step to the login process, like texting a code to your phone so the site can verify you are you. That was FIDO’s doing.
But after years of making logging in more difficult but more secure, the alliance recently began a major push to get platforms and people alike to adopt a technology that may just kill passwords altogether: passkeys.
