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You won’t need to memorize anything with passkeys—unless you count remembering where you keep them! By now, you’ve likely heard about passkeys, a much easier and safer alternative to passwords. No more juggling tricky combos of letters, numbers, and symbols, and they’re even resistant to phishing scams, which are popping up more online.
Most people I talk to love the idea but aren’t sure how to start. It’s actually super simple—you just need to decide how to store your passkeys. Here’s a quick look at your options:
- Your Smartphone: This is a smooth choice, especially if you’re mostly on your phone rather than a laptop or PC. Creating passkeys is usually automatic when you start from a mobile app or browser, and it works great on both iOS and Android.
- Your Tablet: It’s the same easy experience as a phone. This could be perfect if you leave your tablet at home and worry about losing your phone—and all your passkeys—with it.
- Your PC: Windows can save passkeys for you if you set them up on your laptop or desktop.
- A Hardware Key: Think YubiKey or Google Titan Security Key—small dongles that double as strong two-factor authentication and passkey storage. (Just check that older versions support the FIDO2 protocol for compatibility.)
- Your Password Manager: Passwords aren’t going away soon, and even when they do, password managers will still be handy for storing passkeys. If it’s cloud-based, watch out for security—avoid a weak password for the account!—but it’s generally a solid option.
You can dive deeper into how passkeys work in our full guide, but the basics are simple: create them once, then use biometrics (like a fingerprint) or a PIN to approve them. They’re tough to fake or steal, even if a website gets hacked.
The one catch? If you lose the device with your passkeys, you can’t use them. But that’s easy to fix. You can’t back them up since each one is unique, but you can set up extra passkeys on other devices as backups. Keeping an old password with two-factor authentication is also a good safety net to keep hackers out.
Support for passkeys is growing fast, with big names like Google, Apple, Microsoft, and retailers like Target and Best Buy already on board. Even if they haven’t taken over the web yet, most people who try them find switching a few accounts to passkeys saves a ton of hassle.
What do you think about ditching passwords for passkeys? I’d love to hear your thoughts!
Source: PCWorld
