Passkeys: how do they work? No, like, seriously. It’s clear that the industry is increasingly betting on passkeys as a replacement for passwords, a way to use the internet that is both more secure and more user-friendly. But for all that upside, it’s not always clear how we, the normal human users, are supposed to use passkeys. You’re telling me it’s just a thing… that lives on my phone? What if I lose my phone? What if you steal my phone?
Passkeys work like a public/private key pair you’d use to secure SSH access to a server. You give the website a public key that corresponds to a private key generated on your local device. Unlike a password it’s not feasible to brute force and there’s nothing you have to remember which makes it more convenient for you to use. If a site is hacked and they gain access to the public passkey you use to authenticate, it can’t be used to authenticate anywhere.
It’s not really an alternative to a password manager, because you can use a password manager to generate and sync a single passkey between all your devices. In fact 1Password is a big proponent of passkeys and even maintain a big directory of sites that use passkeys.