As the internet has developed, many of us have become reliant on a varying amount of passwords but our dependence on passwords has given way to just as many security risks. As such, the industry is beginning to turn to passkeys as a new promise of security and ease.
Editorial
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According to Andrew Shikiar, executive director and CEO, FIDO Alliance in a FinextraTV interview: “the vast majority of data breaches are tracked back to passwords because cyber criminals can guess them, they can steal them, they can phish them. Any sort of human-readable shared secret that’s transmitted over the network can and will be attacked and taken over. So with passkeys, we eliminate that approach with a fully encrypted communication between a virtual key pair that’s user-friendly and far more secure.”
As an audience that is more nervous about passwords and more likely to forget them, the consumer-focussed sectors adoption of passkeys is booming. As Shikiar says: “over 12 billion consumer accounts have the option of using a passkey and 100s of millions of users are actually using them. […] So we’re seeing a lot of early adoption in […] e-commerce, content, hospitality where ensuring a high level of access is of paramount importance.”
However, as is common with new technologies, there has been some more cautious apprehension from other sectors such as banking. While many of the neobanks have embraced the rising innovation, larger more traditional banks remain uncertain.
Following on from a discussion about why banks may be uncertain, Shikiar explains the reason why passkeys are so essential to our future: “We’ve been talking about the death of passwords for some time – we have been – but now we finally have technology that’s both highly secure and highly usable and most importantly, technology that has support of the entire industry from payment networks to […] leading governments and regulators, there’s this universal support with what we’re doing in FIDO Alliance that will allow us collectively to move beyond our reliance on passwords and to a much safer, much simpler future for user authentication.”
Shikiar’s explanation places high emphasis on the equal balance between usability and security which presents passkeys as a greater alternative to the traditional password. As it is still a relatively new concept to some, its eventual simplicity comes with an initial complication. The central obstacle to bridging the gap between awareness and adoption will be engendering confidence into the more inherently cautious sectors and sceptics.
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