Nobody can deny that in the technology sector Google, Apple and Microsoft are among the biggest names ever. These three big names are about to concretely embark on the road that will lead to the final farewell to passwords .
Right on World Password Day Google announced its plans for a password-less future . How will all this be possible? Much of the work done by Google, but also by Apple and Microsoft, passes through the FIDO Alliance , an organization that involves several large tech companies and which aims to develop standards and protocols that do not require passwords and that are resistant to phishing and other negative practices.
Google detailed how it plans to implement all of its security protocols without requiring a single password from its users: when you unlock your smartphone or log into a website , a unique key referring to your account will be generated. This will allow the key to be associated with the account, and therefore a password entered by the user will no longer be required as the key will be automatically read once the personal device is unlocked.
The key in question will obviously be encrypted with a public key, so no one will be able to access it except the account owner. For this specific aspect, the passwordless future that Google is talking about is undoubtedly safer for users than current standards. In fact, currently there is always a human component , which when it tends towards naivety or inexperience can put the safety of the user at risk.
What happens if the smartphone is lost , where the passkeys generated at the time of unlocking theoretically reside? Nothing, because Google will be able to recover them through a restore from the personal account residing in the cloud .
This path illustrated by Google comes after a decade of important steps taken by BigG: starting from the adoption of the 2-step verification to get to the security token and passwordless authentication on your accounts. Google has reported that support for the future without password will officially arrive on Android and Chrome OS , while Apple and Microsoft will roll it out on iOS , MacOS , Safari , Windows and Edge .
