This is Technology Bytes, episode 140 for November 7th, 2025.Technology Bytes is a microcast where I share brief bites on interesting technology.Enjoy, and here we go.So today I’m going to talk about something that I don’t really know very much about,and yet it is something that I think I like, and I like the concept of, and that is passkeys.And if you haven’t heard of them, it’s really an alternative to passwords,and I’ll get into that as we go through this episode. So I don’t know a lot off the top of my head. I know I use passkeys in situations where they have been made available, and when I am asked if I want to use a password or a passkey, I will choose to use a passkey. Not because I know that much about it, but because I know from the little that I’ve heard and listened to through tech podcasts and things like that, that passkeys are more reliable, maybe more trustworthy, clearly more secure than a password is, although they do have some of their own faults, and I’m not going to pretend to be the expert, but I am going to talk a little bit about what I have discovered in my reading. So we all know what a password is, and we all know what a pain passwords are, and trying to come up with them and trying to remember them can be quite difficult. Now, the world, the tech world, has made it possible for us to do better with our passwords by using a password manager and using password generators that generate strong passwords that we will never remember. And in that case, then you need to use a password manager, or you end up writing them down in a spreadsheet or something. All around, having something that you have to remember is a vulnerable method for security. The sites say you can use maybe sophisticated or even non-sophisticated phishing attacks that get people to expose their passwords. And one thing I read said, passwords are that secret thing that you keep to log into an environment, whatever that happens to be. Until you share it with somebody else, then it’s no longer a secret. It reminds me of a co-worker that my wife worked with many, many years ago who said, it’s not that I can’t keep secrets, it’s the people I tell that can’t keep secrets. And I feel like that’s exactly where passwords sit. They are convenient in the sense that you can make them somewhat memorable, and then there are some that you use so often that you have to make them memorable. I think of like my Apple ID password. I try to make it strong, but because I have to enter it so often in my Apple world, I try to make it as strong as I can, but I also try to make it something that I can keep in my head. But then the other thing that happens with passwords is they are stored somewhere. And so oftentimes they’re stored on the server of the service that you’re logging into. And so that makes them available or susceptible to break-ins on that server or hacks or something like that where we read about it all the time. 20,000 users' passwords were exposed or 100,000, whatever it is, it happens all the time. And so the passkey environment is one that helps to eliminate some of that security risk. So what is a passkey? Well, a passkey is similar to a password in that it’s, if done well, and passkeys are always done well, but if a password is done well, it’s random numbers, characters, special characters, whatever, that are generated for authenticating you to an environment in which you want to log into. Most often in today’s world, those are accessed by biometrics, fingerprints, face ID, those kind of things. And it’s a mixture of personal and private keys, and so that’s where things get a little bit of tech nerdery, I guess. But the idea is there are two matching things that have to be exposed at the same time for you to get logged into a service. And you hold one of those on your device. So with a passkey, someone gets your device, the security of that passkey is greatly compromised. But same with passwords. But the public key is held on the server. So if someone gets the public key because they hacked the service in which you’re logging into, no big deal because they don’t have your private key and they cannot log into that service without both sets of keys. And the idea of the passkey being computer generated means it’s far less hackable than the things that I kind of make up off the top of my head. But one of the concerns with passkeys is, well, I think maybe the biggest concern is that it’s not available everywhere. So even when you want to use it, you may not be able to. But my advice in the password passkey world is that if you have the opportunity to use a passkey, even if you don’t fully understand it, just know that it is more secure. There are things that you don’t have to remember. You just have to know that it’s on your device. And then you get some concerns of, well, what if I’m on my iPad when I had the passkey on my iPhone? Well, those are things that the password managers, and even if you don’t have one, just Apple’s password app that they have released with their latest operating systems, not 26, that happened last year, I think, in 18. But those are synced between your devices. So again, it’s only as secure as the device is secure. So if someone can guess your password to get into your device, because that’s what you use, a passkey. But even then we use biometrics often to do that. So all in all, using this set of keys, it was, I think somewhere I read, you know, if you make a password and you don’t remember it, then you can be in trouble. And in a passkey, if your key gets mangled, then you could be in trouble, too. So that doesn’t really change. But the fact that it’s computer generated, that there’s a pair that goes together, that that has to be both available for you to log into a service, just means our security is better and our memory doesn’t get tested. And we don’t necessarily have to use password managers to manage that either. Although those password managers that are available do that for us as well. So now I’ve told you way more than I know, but I just thought I would talk about it for a minute. I’m not sure if I’ve learned anything myself. I think this is all stuff I’ve heard before. Still trying to wrap my little brain around what that technology actually means. But again, if you have the opportunity, I would use passkeys when you have that opportunity. Well, sorry, I said that wrong. Passkeys if you have the opportunity. Well, that is all I have for today. If you have comments, suggestions or questions, you can send them to technologybytes at merrickfamily.com. As always, I want to thank you for listening to the Technology Bytes microcast, and I look forward to the next time we are together taking another bite of technology.
