Google adds passkey support to Play Services and Chrome beta

Google has added passkey support to the Canary version of Chrome and the beta of Google Play Services. Passkey is an implementation of the FIDO sign-in standard that does not require a password. The feature will appear in the stable channels later this year.

The added support makes it possible for Android users to create a new passkey on their Android devices. In an app that supports the function, you will then see a pop-up notification asking you to check account information in a first step. In a next step, you will be asked for an authentication via fingerprint, a face scan or a screen unlock via a pattern. Logging in with passkeys is done in the same way. Google suggests that the passkeys are managed and synced through the Google password manager on Android. The passkeys are stored in the cloud. This makes it possible for users who lose their devices to log in to a new device via the FIDO authentication method.

Website developers can now also add passkey support to their websites. They must therefore support the WebAuthn API that will be included in the Canary version of Chrome. Chrome users will then be able to sign in to the respective websites using the new FIDO sign-in standard. If a website has added support for passkeys, that site can in turn generate a QR code that can be scanned by an Android device with the Google Play Services beta and logged in using the FIDO method.

According to Google, an API for Android apps will be released later this year. This gives developers the ability to natively build support for the new FIDO sign-in standard into their apps. According to Google, users of those apps will still have the option to use passwords for the time being.

Passkey is the name tech companies give to the FIDO authentication standard that was put forward in May of this year by Google, Apple and Microsoft. These tech companies then suggested that they were going to add support for the FIDO standard in their different types of software ‘within the year’. According to Google, passkey is much more secure than a conventional authentication method because it does not require a password and is based on publickey cryptography. FIDO stands for Fast IDentity Online. The makers hope to make passwordless authentication possible with this standard.