NordPass, part of NordVPN, is announcing the development of its new password storage solution: NordPass Passkeys. This follows the company’s announcement in January declaring its intention to create a “passwordless future”.
The new development allows businesses and individual users to store and manage their passkeys on NordPass instead of the device itself – enabling users to access their digital accounts from various devices and operating systems.
“Online authentication is entering a new modern phase with passkeys at its forefront”, says NordPass CEO Jonas Karklys. He adds that the passkeys development will help solve common issues like locked accounts, password reuse and weak passwords.
Poor password patterns
According to the company, more than 80% of data breaches in 2022 were a result of bad password habits, such as reusing passwords that often have easy letter-number-symbol combinations.
In addition to this, “people often lose access to their accounts when a hacker breaks into the website’s server where the users’ passwords are stored, sometimes even unencrypted”, Karklys explains.
Also read: NordPass adds Password History feature and more localization
NordPass’ annual research shows that the world’s most popular password in 2022 was “password”, followed by “123456”, “123456789”, and “guest”. The company asserts that poor password patterns do not appear to have changed significantly over time and that cybersecurity experts have been searching for new online authentication solutions that would remove users’ responsibility for good password hygiene.
Removing the human element
When users join one of the websites that support passkeys, their device generates a pair of related keys – public and private. While the private key is stored on the device itself, the public key is saved on the website’s server.
A passkey saved on a server is therefore less valuable since it can only work in pairs with the private key saved on a device, lowering hacking threats.
Passkeys are not intended to be memorized as they are made up of randomly generated, unique and long combinations of characters – the technology guarantees that the private and public keys connect without user intervention.
As this technology is already adopted by companies like Microsoft, Google, Apple, Paypal, eBay and KAYAK, NordPass affirms that no element of the user’s security is compromised for convenience.
NordPass Passkeys is available on the desktop app, web vault and on Firefox and Chrome-based browser extensions.
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