Passkeys 101: An Introduction to Passkeys and How They Work

Passwords have long been the weakest link in online security, vulnerable to phishing, reuse, credential stuffing, and database breaches. Passkeys offer a compelling alternative based on public-key cryptography: a private key stays on your device while only the public key is shared with websites. Key advantages include strong phishing resistance (passkeys are bound to the origin they were registered on), elimination of weak or reused credentials, and no sensitive shared secret stored in databases. The post walks through the registration and authentication flows at a high level, and notes that while passkeys solve many password-era problems, they introduce new implementation and threat-model considerations to be explored in follow-up posts.