Passkeys are the future of passwords. At least, they’re the best alternative we have right now to eventually replace logins that can be hacked.
Passkeys rely on the biometrics of a physical device for authentication and security, and therefore, they’re unhackable. Also, with passkeys, you won’t have to worry about setting up two-factor authentication for some of your sensitive digital properties.
Not all apps and services out there support passkeys yet. It’ll be a while until passwords disappear, so they’ll coexist with passkeys until then. That’s why the best place to save your passkeys is a password manager.
It so happens that password managers are among my favorite must-have apps for iPhone and Android. And Proton Pass is one of the most recent ones, an app I’ve been using alongside 1Password for several months now. Like 1Password, Proton Pass now supports passkeys. The best part about it is that you don’t even have to get the premium version of Proton Pass to get passkeys support on all your devices.
Proton announced support for passkeys on Thursday. The feature will be available everywhere you can use Proton Pass. That’s PC or Mac via browser extensions or the iPhone and Android apps.
All you have to do is save your passkeys inside Proton Pass, and they’ll then be available on all your devices. Proton saves the passkeys on its server and then protects them and the metadata (website addresses) with end-to-end encryption. Only you can access passkeys once you unlock Proton Pass on your device.
You can then choose to authenticate into apps that support passkeys with Proton Pass. It should be just as easy as autofiling your password that’s saved in the password manager. And yes, you’ll be able to save your password and passkey(s) you might have for a certain login. However, you have to ensure the respective website or service supports passkeys before doing any of that.
On that note, Proton doesn’t have passkey support for its services. That is, you can’t use a passkey to log into Proton Pass with a passkey. You’ll need your password/PIN or biometrics (Face ID/Touch ID, and alternatives).
Still, support for saving passkeys into Proton Pass is a major upgrade. That means you’ll have your passkeys handy even if you’re not using the device you’ve created a passkey for. That’s the thing with passkeys. When you make one, you attach it to a device.
While passkey support is free for Proton Pass, there are some requirements. To use them, you need to be running iOS 17 on your iPhone or Android 14 on your Android device. Also, the feature might not work in Firefox yet. You’ll find additional help on using passkeys in Proton Pass at this link.
