Last week, a researcher outlined what he said was a “novel attack surface” in passkeys, the new authentication paradigm that offers a more secure alternative to password-based methods. In fact, the attacks demonstrated in the post are neither novel nor unique to passkeys. This distinction is important because the …

Researchers recently reported encountering a phishing attack in the wild that bypasses a multifactor authentication scheme based on FIDO (Fast Identity Online), the industry-wide standard being adopted by thousands of sites and enterprises. If true, the attack, reported in a blog post Thursday by security firm Expel, would be …

Microsoft says it’s making passwordless logins the default means for signing in to new accounts, as the company helps drive an industry-wide push to transition away from passwords and the costly security problems they have created for companies and their users. A key part of the “passwordless by …

Late last year, I published a long post that criticized the user unfriendliness of passkeys, the industry-wide alternative to logging in with passwords. A chief complaint was that passkey implementations tend to lock users into whatever platform they used to create the credential. An example: When using Chrome on …