in recent yearsWorld No Password Day is all about promoting the idea that passwords are no longer needed. After all, if a password is to be secure, it will be difficult to remember, and once it is difficult to remember, people will want to reuse it. However, no matter how strong the password is, based on the shared key, it is difficult to guarantee that the information stored on your device and server will not be phished or stolen… The above has not mentioned the trade-off between ease of use and security strength and other factors.
In order to solve this multiple “password” problem that has been interlocked for many years, Apple officially launched the passkeys in iCloud Keychain technology test at this WWDC Developer Conference that can “theoretically” solve almost all previous technical problems and create an account/login using only Face ID or fingerprints.
▲Picture source for this article: Apple
Apple launches passkeys in iCloud Keychain technology test for “passwordless experience” to more securely replace passwords with Face ID
In the “Move beyond passwords” explanation video at the end of this WWDC developer conference, Apple announced that it will open the passkeys in iCloud Keychain technology test for developers to create a passwordless experience based on the WebAuthn standard. Combined with the concept of a similar hardware security key (that is, something that looks like a USB flash drive), by using a “pair” of private/public key pairs (Private/Public Key pairs) generated from the device, the pain points of various password authentications (including hardware security keys) at this stage can be solved (almost) all at once. Pass.
Compared with traditional password mechanisms, Apple’s solution because the private key is always retained on the device side. Therefore, the server side only needs to use a public key that is almost as public as the user account to generate a challenge code for the login request. After confirming that the feature code sent back from the device is correct, the login is completed.
At this point, it is considered to be close to the advantages of hardware security keys over traditional passwords. For this reason, Apple believes that this technology has better security than two-stage authentication. However, since it needs to be bound to the hardware, how can it solve the recoverability problem that cannot be achieved by the security key?
It’s very simple, it’s the “keychain” behind passkeys in iCloud Keychain. Like iCloud’s existing password synchronization feature, Apple will lock the private key information in the cloud. So even if you lose all your (Apple) devices, you can still find them by logging in to your Apple ID. As for “Always with you”… Basically, today’s mobile phones should be considered portable enough, right?
That is to say, the final lack of support for “non-Apple devices”… Unless one day a third party can equip the Secure Enclave of the T2 chip or M1 SoC, it should be difficult to solve. (Further reading:M1 Mac not only has the high efficiency of black technology, but also makes security truly “in place”）
With the support of all these authentication mechanisms, in the future, when you encounter apps or web services that support the WebAuthn standard, you will only need to use biometric authentication such as Face ID / Touch ID to quickly complete registration or login – yes, even creating an account only requires entering the user name or email address, and the rest is face scanning or fingerprint authentication, which is super simple!
The reason why such a passwordless experience can be achieved is that the information exchanged cannot be guessed and reused, and will be less likely to be phished or leaked – after all, the server only has information that is already public. So even in the past, you could use the iCloud keychain to authenticate and enter a password to log in, but the entire passkeys in iCloud Keychain technology has been very different.
Everyone should be thinking when seeing this. With such a convenient, fast and safe function, I don’t have to worry about it!
Unfortunately, this time iOS 15 and macOS 12 are only open for preliminary technology preview testing (and they are still for developers). The main reason is that Apple believes that in order to promote the industry to go password-free, more comprehensive considerations and designs are needed to make all the details the best – after all, it is related to security. According to engineer Garrett Davidson, this is now just the first step in “many years” of efforts to replace passwords.
Although it feels like it really takes a long time. However, as ordinary users, seeing so many technology companies working hard on this, we can still look forward to a future where passwords are no longer involved (waving hands).
Citing sources
Further reading:
How to head track Apple TV without U1 chip? Apple has the answer
Source: KOCPC Chinese