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Why You Should Swap Passwords for Passkeys
Sign in with your face, fingerprint or PIN instead
5-minute read
VIDEO: Ditch Your Passwords for This More Secure Login Method
How to Use Passkeys
Key takeaways
- Passkeys let you sign in with your face, fingerprint or device PIN instead of a username and password.
- Passkeys are more secure because the private key stays on your device, making it harder for hackers to steal.
- Passkeys can sync across devices, but they aren’t available everywhere, so passwords aren’t going away yet.
Got a tech query? AARP members and readers are invited to send me their questions about devices, online safety, social media and navigating today’s technology.
I hate remembering passwords, so I tend to use the same or similar ones across numerous devices and sites, and yeah, I know this isn’t very secure. Lately I’ve been noticing another option for logging in called passkeys. Can you explain how they work and whether I should use them?
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We can all agree that remembering passwords is a drag, which is why many people, such as yourself, tend to reuse the same ones everywhere or keep clicking the “forgot password” option. At best, we’re indifferent to them, even as we begrudgingly recognize their purpose.
Exacerbating the problem is that to avoid forgetting them, many of the passwords people choose are all too easy for cyber crooks to crack, resulting in numerous high-profile data breaches and phishing scams in which someone sends you an email from a company that looks official but is fake. Do you really think you’re the only person using your dog’s first name?
What’s the difference?
Passcode, a.k.a. personal identification number (PIN): A short numeric code used to verify your identity.
Password: A combination of characters you create to log in.
Passphrase: A longer string of words that works like a password but may be easier to remember.
Passkey: A password-free way to sign in using your face, fingerprint or device PIN.
It’s a key reason a password alternative called passkeys has been gaining traction. Backed by the biggest names in tech — Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft and Samsung — as well as large companies in other fields, passkeys are indeed considered more secure and less vulnerable to attacks. They have been around for a few years now.
The concept might be difficult to grasp at first, but the huge payback is that once passkeys are established, you won’t have to remember passwords or even usernames. Instead, you can log into apps and websites via your face, fingerprint, local PIN (personal identification number) or other biometric methods, the same processes you use to unlock your devices. Passkeys sync across multiple devices, including new ones. They can also be imported and exported across competing tech platforms.
The promise behind passkeys is that they won’t force you to confront the usual trade-off between convenience and ease of use versus something far more bulletproof.
Seven billion passkeys are now in active use globally, according to the FIDO Alliance (Fast Identity Online), an industry group that helped develop the cryptographic-based standard. Three of four consumers who were surveyed in April 2026 by Sapio Research have enabled passcodes on at least some of their accounts; 40 percent have enabled passcodes on most of their apps or accounts.
How do passcodes work?
In layperson’s terms, a pair of hidden keys is created that must match. One is a “public key” that is shared on a web server. The other is the corresponding “private key,” unique to your device, so someone would need your computer, phone or tablet for a security breach to be possible.
Methods for saving and creating a passkey vary by app, website or browser. If you come to a site where passkeys are accepted, you may see a “create passkey” button or pop-up to click or tap on.
Or you may see a QR code on the computer screen that you can scan with your phone’s camera. This step won’t be required the next time you try to sign in with the same computer. Once you do sign in, you’ll be presented with the option to create a passcode for that machine. Make sure this is your own device before doing so.
Keep What Matters Safe
Keep your most important documents in one secure place. With the AARP Digital Vault, you can store, organize and access digital copies of your insurance policies, tax records, and photos anytime, anywhere. It’s just $20 a year as an add-on AARP membership benefit.
You can save passkeys in password managers or on hardware security keys and add them to personal, work or school accounts.
If you don’t see a passkey option when you visit a new site or app, it means the technology isn’t currently supported.
Apple points out that if you are using a public computer (say, at a library, an internet café or in a friend’s house) that is not associated with your Apple account, but you have your iPhone with you, you can create a passcode and save it to that device to securely log in.
According to Microsoft, through a process known as “cross-device authentication,” a passkey stored on one device can be used to sign in to another device via a QR code generated on the device where you want to sign in.
You can also change a passkey if, say, you shared your device with someone you’d like to revoke it from.
If you lose your phone or another device that has your passkey, or it is stolen, the idea is you will still be safe from a cybersecurity point of view, since the private key saved on the device means you need to be the one possessing and authenticating it, again by face, fingerprint and so on.
You can also have more than one passkey and, under certain circumstances, share them with your family.
Physical security tokens, and sometimes the two-factor authentication codes meant to add another layer of protection by complementing passwords, may no longer be required, though you can still use them for extra security. While even the strongest passwords can be manipulated by hackers, with passkeys, there is no password to hack. Moreover, while the “public key cryptography” technique behind passkeys is complex, FIDO says consumers accustomed to using facial recognition or fingerprints to log in to sites and apps won’t experience big changes.
Will passwords ever die?
While the point of passkeys is to replace passwords, the latter are not going to disappear anytime soon. Your bank, broker and other companies you do business with are likely to be on their own timeline. And of course, even if you’ve created a passkey, you can still log into places with your username and password as a backup. That is, if you remember your credentials.
The key takeaways were created with the assistance of generative AI. An AARP editor reviewed and refined the content for accuracy and clarity.
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