Today is a big day for passkeys as two leaders in the market, 1Password and Yubico AB, announced milestones of a different sort for the growing security method.

1Password became the latest security provider to embrace passkeys — mostly, since this is just another example of how passkeys are more of a journey than a destination. It is a good step forward for the password management company, but like so many other passkey-related efforts, the devil will be in the implementation details.

Also today, longtime passkey supporter Yubico went public on the Swedish Nasdaq First Growth Market stock exchange. Yubico was an early leader in selling various USB hardware security keys. The company gained fame when Google standardized on its keys for all of its employees.

Yubico announced its intentions back in April and secured their first investment round of $30 million in June. Going public was accomplished by getting acquired by the holding company ACQ Bure. This is only the second time in Swedish corporate history that a holding company has gone public, according to Yubico representatives.

The 1Password announcement is illustrative of the growing interest in passkeys as well. It will now support passkeys for mobile devices running iOS 17 and Android 14, but not earlier versions. What this means is that users can save a passkey to a mobile device and login with a mobile browser running the 1Password extension.

Users of Firefox browsers will eventually be supported. For users of earlier mobile operating systems, “you can still share, manage, and sync passkeys in 1Password,” said Steve Won, the chief product officer of the company. Another limitation is that users won’t be able to unlock their password vaults until the next beta version is released later this fall. Users will also be able to create, save and sign in with passkeys from desktop browsers.

SiliconANGLE covered passkeys most recently at the end of June with the FIDO Alliance’s update publishing a series of white papers explaining the concept. This corpus still remains one of the best sources on what passkeys are and how businesses can implement them.

1Password will eventually be joined by competitor LastPass US LP. The latter announced it will support passkeys by “later this year.”

There are several handy directories with links to applications that support passkeys, including this one maintained by 1Password. This capabilities matrix from the various authentication standards bodies is more useful for corporate developers that want to take a deeper dive into what currently is and isn’t supported. An excerpt is shown here:

Finally, Hanko, which is one of the early passkey authentication vendors, has this summary of what works and what doesn’t across specific browsers and operating systems.

Images: 1Password, FIDO Alliance