A Survey on Password-free Authentication Method: Passkey

Date

2025-1-15

Author

Doğan, Sait Göktuğ

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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When a need for to authenticate someone or something, the first answer that comes to mind is to use passwords. While implemented and used properly, passwords are more than enough to securely authenticate. But like everything in the world, passwords have many flaws. It has problems such as guessable passwords, data breaches leaking user passwords, and reuse of the same passwords in different places. To increase security of password authentication, Multi-factor Authentication (MFA) solutions are used together with passwords. But now, a new approach for authentication has arrived, passkeys, claimed to provide better authentication experience in terms of both security and usability. Passkeys are governed by the FIDO Alliance and have a standard called FIDO2. It uses public key cryptography to achieve password-free authentication. Since no passwords are used, passkeys are resistant to threats such as offline cracking, replay attacks, phishing attacks, and reuse of passwords. The study aims to introduce passkeys with explanation of weaknesses in currently used text-based password authentication systems and how technically passkeys can fix these issues and achieve secure password-free authentication. The current state of adoption of passkeys will also be examined. In conclusion, there will be discussion on the advantages and disadvantages of passkeys.

Subject Keywords

Authentication, Passkey, Password-free Authentication

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/113048

Collections

Graduate School of Informatics, Term Project