Passkey for iPhone

halhack
halhack
Community Member

Will 1password be supporting apple’s new Passkeys?

Comments

  • Hey there @halhack

    You betcha we will! 😁 Apple are only one member of the larger FIDO Alliance who are responsible for setting the standards for passkeys, and a number of big players in the tech industry are working on them together, including Google and Microsoft.

    Passkeys are an open standard, rather than any one company's product, just like passwords, and I expect the word "passkey" will gradually replace "password" in everyday language over time.

    We joined the FIDO Alliance back in July 2022 to add our customers' voice to the conversation, and to be at the forefront of passkeys' development. There's a blog post about this here, written by our CEO Jeff Shiner, which you might find interesting:

    We’ve joined the FIDO Alliance to build a better future for authentication

    There's also a sneak peek of how we see passkeys working with 1Password in the near future in a video. 👀

    Just because passwords will be (gradually) going away, that doesn't mean 1Password will be too. If anything, we'll be needed more than ever, because you'll need somewhere to put your passkeys! As more and more websites start using them, managing them (like you do now with passwords) will just be another thing that 1Password can do.

    Please let me know if you have any questions, or would like any further help. :)

    — Grey

  • lspeterman
    lspeterman
    Community Member

    Really curious to see the data flow for this in apple's world. Will the passkey go to the keychain by default, or will 1P interrupt that flow?

  • @lspeterman

    Passkeys are still at the very early stages of rollout, both to websites and to end users, so right now we're only really seeing information about how platform vendors like Apple, Google, and Microsoft are planning to implement them for themselves, and there's very little information forthcoming about how third parties, like 1Password, will be able to coexist with that.

    If we use passwords as the closest parallel, Apple allows third-party apps to register with iOS as data providers for its own Password AutoFill system. iOS then manages the detection and filling of forms using the data it requests from the third-party app. This is how 1Password is able to (indirectly) autofill into apps and browsers on iPhones and iPads.

    I wouldn't be surprised if we see something in iOS similar to this in which iOS itself deals with the registration and presentation of passkeys but delegates their storage to a third-party app. It's possible, but nowhere near confirmed right now. We'll have to wait for more details to emerge from Apple about this before we can connect the dots any further.

    On a Mac, things will probably be a bit more straightforward. Because 1Password already controls autofill in the browser without going through macOS first, we should be able to handle passkeys from end to end, much like we do with passwords and other items now.

    As the passkey standard develops, and as the rollout progresses, we'll be able to learn more about how it will look to our customers when they use it, and we'll be able to bring that to you. Keep an eye on our Blog or sign up for our monthly(-ish) Newsletter to see what's going on in that regard.

    The actual nuts and bolts (so to speak) of how passkeys will be managed are still to be confirmed by our platform vendor partners, and this is why we joined the FIDO Alliance – to make sure that our perspective as a password manager, and more importantly, the perspective of our customers, is heard and acted upon. We want to be a prominent voice in the room to make sure that 1Password is the best way to use and manage your passkeys, just as it is for your passwords and other data.

  • erostratuss
    erostratuss
    Community Member

    Thank you for this update. The way I read this is that you could implement passkeys right now on the desktop but are simply choosing not to, presumably because a desktop-only feature is not worth the investment at this point. If that’s the case, it’s disappointing. But even on mobile, is it not possible for your plugin to implement QR code screen captures for passkeys? Wouldn’t that allow you to create passkeys, as well as validate public keys for logins? The impression I had was that iOS isn’t making you pass the entire key back and forth between browser and 1Password. Instead, 1Password on iOS could validate existing passkeys in a vault by passing the QR code from Safari to 1Password and performing the website validation within 1Password, while the user sees the outcome of this validation in Safari.

    I believe Cisco Duo has already implemented this.

  • Dave_1P
    edited November 2022

    @erostratuss

    The way I read this is that you could implement passkeys right now on the desktop but are simply choosing not to, presumably because a desktop-only feature is not worth the investment at this point.

    I wouldn't read Grey's reply that way. Our team is working hard on passkey support and we've recently acquired a company named Passage which will allow us to accelerate adoption of passwordless technology across the industry. You can find our blog about the exciting news here: 1Password acquires Passage to help bring passwordless authentication to everyone

    In the blog, published just over a week ago, we also shared an update about our work on passkeys:

    "Over the coming months, we’ll be rolling out a comprehensive, end-to-end solution for passwordless authentication, beginning with full support for creating, saving, and using device-agnostic passkeys in 1Password during the first half of 2023."

    -Dave

This discussion has been closed.