Now login without passwords on Android and Google Chrome: All details

Earlier in May this year, Apple, Google and Microsoft announced plans to offer a common passwordless sign-in option to users. This is called ‘Passkeys’, developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the FIDO Alliance. The search giant is now making it a reality.

However, this feature is currently available only for developers and Google is planning to offer passkeys feature to regular users later this year. The tech giant says that one will be able to create and use passkeys on Android devices without worrying about syncing issues because it will be backed up to Google Password Manager. Backing up to a cloud-service is necessary because when a user sets up a new Android device by transferring data from an old device, existing end-to-end encryption keys would securely get transferred to the new device, according to Google.

Users would be able to create a passkey easily on their Android devices by simply choosing a Google account and then authenticating their registered fingerprint or face unlock to complete the process.

Google says, “A passkey is a cryptographic private key. In most cases, this private key lives only on the user’s own devices, such as laptops or mobile phones. When a passkey is created, only its corresponding public key is stored by the online service. During login, the service uses the public key to verify a signature from the private key, This can only come from one of the user’s devices. Additionally, the user is also required to unlock their device or credential store for this to happen, preventing sign-ins from e.g a stolen phone.”