A Comparative Study of Passwordless Authentication

In today’s scenario, software applications are facing new challenges while using password authentication for providing access to accounts. It can be easily understood and appreciated that while passwords have been existing for decades, they have become highly vulnerable to security attacks leading to data breaches. With the huge advancement in Artificial Intelligence, there has been a tremendous increase in sophisticated tools used by cybercriminals to gain unauthorized access. Therefore, there is a growing demand for passwordless technologies that can provide a highly secure and efficient way for authentication. This study explores detailed information on various passwordless authentication technologies and analyzes their benefits and drawbacks. Additionally, it attempts to make a comparison between these technologies based on different criteria. Passwordless authentication is commonly based on public-key cryptography, which uses a cryptographic key pair with a public and private key. The public key is used by authenticating services to authenticate users using the private key stored on the user’s device secured behind a non-knowledge based authentication factor.