Passkeys Made Effortless: The Future of Secure, Passwordless Authentication

Passwordless is a topic that I get to discuss with almost all the CIAM leads I meet daily. Why so much about passwordless? Is that something hard to implement?

Passwordless authentication eliminates phishing risks, improves security, and enhances user experience by replacing passwords with biometrics or device-based authentication. It’s safer, faster, and reduces IT overhead.

All the conversations about passwordless end up with the question, “Do you support Passkeys?”. Why Passkeys? If you don’t know, don’t worry. If you want hands-on experience, it’s just a few minutes.

Before that,

They are the most secure and user-friendly passwordless solution currently available, offering phishing resistance, seamless cross-device access, and no shared secrets. Unlike SMS codes or security keys, they provide stronger protection with biometrics or device authentication, making them safer, faster, and more convenient for users and businesses.

One of the key features of Passkeys is that they are based on PKI infrastructure, which is very safe. On top of that, your browser also will make sure it’s not susceptible to man-in-the-middle attacks or phishing attacks.

The browser will ensure that you won’t be engaging your passkey if the site you are trying to access is not where you registered your passkey. With this, even if an attacker sends out a phishing site, the passkey won’t work as it’s not the domain to which the passkey is registered.

Did you ever think enabling passkeys for your application is just a few minutes of work? Let me explain to you the experience. Don’t be afraid. You don’t need to have/own anything physical called “passkeys.”

Visit Asgardeo and sign up. Use social login, which is just one tap. Of course, you have to create an organization by giving a name.

Go to “Users” under “User Management” and create a user by giving a username and a password.

Visit the My Account portal and log in as the user you just created. You can find the My Account URL at the top of your Application view.

Let’s register the passkey. Don’t be afraid; you don’t need to have any specific hardware to do this. All you need is either a phone or a computer.

Once you logged into my account. Under “Security” tab register a passkey by clicking on + sign under Passkeys. Follow the instructions.

Boom.. You registered your passkey. To try out how the passkey can be used to authenticate to an application, let’s use one of the sample applications provided with Asgardeo.

Again, access the Asgardeo Administration Console. Launch the “Try It” application, available under the “Applications Tab.”

This is a sample playground application that gives you the ability to play around with IAM concepts.

Now you need to onboard Passkey as an authentication option for this app. To do that, Click on the “Login Flow” tab and then “Add sign in option”

Pick Passkey as the option.

There you go. Now, you have picked Passkey as the authentication option for the sample TryIt application.

Click on the “Try Login” button on the “Try It” application page.

Before I conclude,

If you have any application that supports standard authentication protocols such as OpenID Connect or SAML, you can integrate your application with Asgardeo within minutes. It’s the developer experience that matters.