Passwords are essential in protecting accounts, at least they are currently essential. In the future it could be possible that passwords will be obsolete.
“Over the last five years, though, the secure-authentication industry association known as the FIDO Alliance has been making real progress promoting “passkeys,” a password-less alternative for signing into applications and websites. And yet, you probably still use a lot of passwords every day. In fact, you may not have any accounts protected by a passkey at all, despite broad adoption from Microsoft, Google, Apple, and many more.” (Wired).
Password managers are currently a good source of cyber security, but this could change with this new development.
“‘The best strategy for account security is to use password managers, but you need to combine them with other protections,’ said Chris Pierson, founder of BlackCloak, a firm specializing in digital security for executives.” (WSJ).
There are many trustworthy password managers on the market.
“Password managers are great. Not just for security, but also convenience. They auto-fill credentials, credit-card numbers and other data on computers and mobile devices, making logins and online shopping easier. The best premium options are 1Password and Dashlane. Bitwarden offers a solid free plan with fewer features. To date, none of these are known to have been hacked.” (WSJ).
Passkeys could be replacing passwords, but managers will stay.
“‘What I want to highlight is how far we’ve come, but which problems still remain unsolved,’ Christiaan Brand, co-chair of the FIDO2 technical working group and an identity and security product manager at Google says. ‘Passwords are everywhere, and they are bad, but everyone is accustomed to them. Users don’t want to be surprised, and they don’t like change. So it’s very important to think about passkeys as an augmentation. We need to kind of push users toward the thing that will be easier and more secure.’” (Wired).
This will be far in the future, but it won’t hurt to start evaluating your passwords, password managers and thinking about how passkeys will change things.
“For now, though, the tech industry is still in the early stages of this long haul transition. ‘Part of the problem is that all the stuff that I have in my presentation, we haven’t really seen this put into practice yet,’ Brand says. ‘There are passkey implementations out there, and some folks have dipped their toe in the water, but a lot of the stuff isn’t really in the mainstream consciousness of developers, and certainly not for users. The mass, super-scale adoption is still something that we’re working to make happen.’” (Wired).
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Sources:
Wired. https://www.wired.com/story/passwords-passkey-transition-time/
WSJ. https://www.wsj.com/articles/after-the-lastpass-hack-can-you-trust-password-managers-5e2d066f
