Biometrics are a big deal.
Even if they aren’t using the term biometrics, more and more digital apps and services are starting to offer some form of biometric authentication as a way of logging in.
But just why is this a big deal?
We’ve shared here numerous times about how bad the old username and password system is, so we won’t rehash all those details today. Just know that the old system is really, really bad, and we need a modern alternative.
Biometrics could be a big part of that alternative — which is why they’re a big deal.
Done right, biometrics offer us an extremely reliable system for authentication that’s far more secure than the old faithful password. Here’s what you need to know.
What Are Biometrics?
The term biometrics describes the practice of identifying, recognizing, or authenticating an individual using attributes unique to that individual, such as fingerprints, retina scans, or 3D face modeling, typically for security purposes.
If that sounds an awful lot like Touch ID or Face ID on your iPhone, well, that’s exactly what it is.
That’s the funny thing: most consumers have been using biometrics to unlock their smartphones for the better part of a decade. But for logging into web services, work email, and the like? It still seems like newfangled tech, and implementing it widely has been a struggle.
Why Haven’t Businesses Adopted Biometrics?
Some already have, but it’s far from universal.
A big reason is the hardware requirements: most PC laptops don’t come with fingerprint readers, and even the ones that do don’t enjoy widespread software and services support. So even if you can use a thumbprint to unlock your laptop, you can’t really use one to log into your bank or your email, and so on.
(Mac users rely on their Touch ID for more, but most of this is still just to unlock their password manager and automatically paste in an old-school password — not really the same thing.)
So even though everyone knows conventional passwords aren’t very secure, we’ve been more or less stuck with the system.
Now, it can be made more secure using two-factor or multifactor authentication (2FA or MFA), which we definitely recommend implementing where available. But a new innovation using biometrics is arriving, and it looks to be even better than MFA.
This new solution is called the passkey.
Passkeys Incorporate Biometrics and Other Authenticators
The big tech firms are starting to roll out passkeys in some consumer products, and they’re popping up in more and more business products, too. We expect that within a couple of years they’ll be available just about anywhere, and they’re way more secure than usernames and passwords. So we recommend making the switch as soon as they roll out on a given service.
Passkeys use some technical wizardry behind the scenes that involves public keys, private keys, encryption, and biometrics, producing an authentication experience that’s far safer and has less friction than other approaches.
The genius behind passkeys is that they recognize how we’re all carrying biometric identifiers around in our pockets anyways — our smartphones — and leverage those devices to handle biometric identification.
Once you establish trust on a device (say, your smartphone), it’s automatically connected to your passkey in such a way that you can use your face or fingerprint to authenticate the passkey — no password required whatsoever.
The Passkey Rollout Is In Progress, But Not Complete
Passkeys look like they’re going to be a big part of the future of authentication, and they have all the biggest names in tech behind them (including Microsoft, Google, and Apple). But they aren’t universal yet, which means we’re in a transition period where various services may require different ways of logging in.
Got questions about passkey implementation? We’re here to help — reach out anytime.