Online payment system PayPal announced today it was adding passkeys as “an easy and secure log in method for PayPal accounts.”
For those who don’t know still, passkeys are a new industry standard created by the FIDO Alliance & the World Wide Web Consortium that replace passwords with cryptographic key pairs, offering customers a simple & secure way to log in to PayPal based on technology that is resistant to phishing & designed so that there is no shared passkey data between platforms. The new PayPal log in option will first be available to iPhone, iPad, or Mac users on PayPal.com. It will then expand to additional platforms as those platforms add support for passkeys.
A founding member of the FIDO Alliance, PayPal is one of the first financial services companies to make passkeys widely available to its users. This cutting-edge security standard is significant as passkeys address one of the biggest security problems on the Web, which is the weakness of password authentication.
PayPal said in a post that passkeys will also help more consumers complete their purchases with PayPal – once PayPal users create a passkey, they won’t have to remember their password, allowing them to check out with greater ease. According to a recent survey of US consumers, 44% of consumers had abandoned an Online purchase because they forgot a password.
