Good news for security enthusiasts (and us others): WebAuthn (short for Web Authentication), a standard for verifying your identity on the Internet, has now been launched as an official standard by the World Wide Web Consortium and the FIDO Alliance. This means that soon you will be able to use hardware devices, such as USB security keys and biometric scanners, to securely log in to web applications and services.
It also means you won't need to remember passwords to access your accounts (although you should already be using a password manager to help you with this).
The WebAuthn standard is already supported by popular browsers such as Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Microsoft Edge. The only thing left is for websites to adopt the API and allow users to choose to log in via hardware supported by WebAuthn.
It's worth noting that Google already offers a similar option for signing into its services using a hardware key. You'll need to buy two of these to sign up (one of them serves as a backup), and they'll run you around $35-$45 for a set. These keys simply require you to plug them into your desktop's USB port or connect to your system via Bluetooth. Some options also provide an added layer of security by requiring you to authenticate yourself with a fingerprint.
Once this secure hardware authentication control system is completed, people will have far fewer reasons to reuse their old passwords. This will make them less vulnerable to identity theft through data breaches of major online services, as hackers are known to test the same username‑password combination across many web applications to gain access to them.
Let's hope that we will see our favorite services adopt WebAuthn correctly and hardware keys become more widespread and economically available, so that we can stop worrying about passwords and breaches.
