Google is paving the way for a world without passwords, but a new offering based on access keys, linking a private key to a user’s personal account and syncing it across devices for use on the web.

The FIDO (Fast Identity Online) Alliance, to which some of the most important technology companies are members and whose aim is to create new secure standards for the management of digital services, has proposed a new security approach that surpasses both password and two passwords. -factor authentication.

These are multi-device credentials that can circumvent phishing, which threatens two other security barriers. In this case, it’s an offering that saves cryptographic information on the device (mobile, computer or tablet), a private key that creates a signature, and is then authenticated by a server that was actually created with said private key when an attempt is made. made to access a website.

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In practice, this process works similarly to a password manager and is known commercially as a passkey, as the alliance itself noted in its March 2022 report on How FIDO Handles All Use Cases.

Its support was already included in iOS in the second beta of version 15.5, and now Google is working to include it in lines of code for the latest version of Google Play Services (version 22.15.14), as they discovered on 9to5Google. ).

In the case of Android, the access keys are saved in the Google account; this allows this information to be synchronized between devices; useful, for example, when you switch to a new mobile phone. The user will still have to sign in to their account with a password, but bypass this in web services.