Photo: Ascannio / Shutterstock.com
X, the social media giant, has extended its support for passkey logins for iOS users, making this option available to users worldwide. This move follows the initial launch of passkey support for iOS users in the United States earlier this year in January.
Passkeys are hailed as a more secure alternative to traditional passwords due to their resistance against phishing attacks, social engineering schemes, and login theft. When users activate and configure a passkey login, they establish a unique key pair serving as their digital authentication credential.
This approach grants the service access to one key while strong the other locally on the user’s device, enhancing identity verification. For example, in this case, one passkey (public key) will be stored with X, while the other (private key) will be stored on the user’s device.
Users confirm their identity by authenticating via biometric credentials or device passcode.
To activate the passkey on X, users can navigate to the Settings and privacy section within Your account on their iOS app. Under Security and account access, the Passkey option can be found under Additional password protection.
The passkey approach has been gaining traction for the following reasons:
- Easy and quick sign-in: Users don’t have to remember their passwords whenever they want to sign in on the platform. In case they forget the password, the platform will prompt them to reset it, a lengthy and boring process. With the passkey, users can easily sign in from different devices.
- Enhanced security: Passkeys offer more protection than traditional passwords. One key is stored privately on your device, making it more secure.
As of now, X has not made passkey mandatory for logging in on the platform. However, the platform highly encourages users to adopt passkeys.
To use passkeys across all devices, users have to sign in to their iCloud account, and the passkeys will sync using the iCloud Keychain. If the device is stolen, users can recover their passkeys using iCloud keychain escrow.
As of now, X hasn’t released any statement regarding the availability of this feature for Android users. In May last year, Google announced they were bringing passkeys and encouraging users to ditch passwords.
In the News: Cybercrooks are phishing via ScrubCrypt tool to deploy VenomRAT
