Microsoft is taking its biggest step toward a password-free future. The company will now ask people who sign up for new accounts to default to more secure methods like access tokens, push notifications, and security keys.
Microsoft is taking its biggest step toward a password-free future. The company will now ask people who sign up for new accounts to default to more secure methods like access tokens, push notifications, and security keys.
Microsoft's new password-free initiative is accompanied by the launch of an optimized login window: to make the process easier, the order of steps has been changed and now an access key is used instead of a password, writes The Verge.
Current accounts will not lose their passwords, but new accounts will not be prompted to create a password at all.
“As part of this simplified interface, we are changing the default behavior for new accounts. New Microsoft accounts will now be ‘passwordless by default.’ New users will have multiple options for signing in to their account without a password, and they will never need to register a password. Existing users can visit their account settings to remove their password,” the company explains.
With these changes, Microsoft is renaming "World Password Day" to "World Access Key Day" and vows to continue working on implementing access keys throughout the next year.
The company introduced access keys to consumer accounts in May 2024. Microsoft claims that nearly a million access keys are registered every day, and that such users have a 98% successful sign-in rate compared to 32% for password-based accounts.
