Once upon a time, signing into sites and apps was simple. You remember those days, right? (They really weren’t that long ago, though by tech standards, it’s been roughly seven centuries.) All you’d do is remember a single username and password — or maybe put it on a Post-it and stick it to the bottom of your 11″ oatmeal-gray 7,000-lb. monitor monster, if you were really feeling fancy — and that’s it: You’d be ready to rush into whatever site or service you wanted, whenever the need arose. Now, it’s a whole other story. If you’re following best practices, you’ve got unique, complex alphanumerical passwords for every single site and service you visit — managed by a password manager and supplemented by two-factor authentication. And if that isn’t enough, you’re increasingly being prompted to drop all of those elements and instead rely on a newer and even more mystifying method of authentication called a passkey. Whether you’re a gadget-loving technophile or a perpetually befuddled technophobe — and whether you’re an individual tech user or part of a broader corporate organization — the one consistent reality about passkeys is that they’re confusing as all get-out. Their aim may be to simplify security around sign-ins, but in actuality, they create all sorts of uncertainty and unanswered questions. Let’s start at the beginning: Passkeys are a relatively recent security feature that let you log in to an account simply by authenticating on a device with your fingerprint or face scan — or, in some cases, another screen lock mechanism (e.g., the PIN or passcode you put into your device when first firing it up). In a sense, it’s kind of like two-factor authentication — only instead of typing in a traditional password and then verifying it’s you as a second step, you’re basically just jumping right to that second step with the knowledge that such action shows you’ve already unlocked an approved device and demonstrated your identity. The idea is that passwords are inherently vulnerable, since they’re text-based codes that you type in or store somewhere and thus that someone else could potentially access or figure out (or find in one of the endless series of breaches we hear about these days). With a passkey, that risky variable is eliminated. Instead, you’re signing in solely based on the fact that you’ve already unlocked your phone or computer — ideally using some manner of biometric authentication but at the very least using a PIN or passcode there — and thus have already proven who you are. And you set up a different passkey for each site or service, eliminating the possibility of reused credentials. Plus, you personally have that device in front of you, which means a hacker couldn’t crack the code and pretend to be you without physically taking your device and being able to get past its lock screen. On a technical level, the bits and bytes that make up a passkey are encrypted with public key cryptography — a fancy way of saying they rely on a pair of keys, one that’s public and one that’s stored privately on your local device — which makes them exceptionally difficult to crack or plunder. That’s in large part because of the way the private key piece of the puzzle works: In short, the site you’re signing into never sees your private key and only receives confirmation that it’s present and valid. The key itself remains on your device, with encryption keeping it unreadable until the moment you authenticate. The actual passkey data is never transferred during the login, and there’s no real mechanism to even copy and paste it anywhere, like you would with a password, so the potential for a hacker to exploit it is pretty darn slim. The one extra wrinkle is that for most people and purposes, the underlying (and encrypted) passkey data is synced to a service that’s connected to a secure account you own and thus can use to sign back in and restore the passkey on a different device. That’s the case with the Google Password Manager system associated with Android, with the iCloud Keychain system associated with iOS, and with most third-party password managers such as 1Password and Bitwarden, too. For more visit OUR FORUM.