Passkeys vs Password Manager: Which Method Is Better to Keep Your Accounts Safe
We want to stay safe from hackers and not become a victim of the surge in cybercrime that is attacking users at a worldwide level. To do that, we must set laziness aside and start being proactive when it comes to our own cybersecurity practices.
It is very common to have thought of why would anyone be interested in stealing this or that account anyway, it does not even have that many followers. But the truth is that almost any profile of us on the Internet that a hacker can gain access to will be of much interest to them, as there is a huge potential of them being able to keep infiltrating to get something useful from us.
That is to say, every profile of us on social media o any kind of online platform we are registered in is somehow valuable, and we should not be relaxed about the possibility of someone stealing our access.
Luckily, there are two tools you are probably familiar with, that can help us a lot when it comes to managing our passwords or credentials. We have the newer passkeys, on one side, and the already widespread password managers, on the other.
Keys on Black Background
As you know, passkeys allow us to sign in to a site with a data type that can be found only in one device, or that is genuinely attached to us in a way that most hackers would not be able to replicate. For example, we can use our fingerprint or our face with facial recognition to be used as passkeys, so that even knowing our written password is ineffective for the criminal.
Speaking now about password managers, these programs are still very useful for us to put in practice the one site-one password rule, that not many people follow in real life. Ideally, we should use completely different passwords, better if randomly and automatically generated, for different platforms, so that access to one does not give the hacker access to more of our accounts at the same time.
They are not only good for storing these credentials, but they also speed up the process of signing to sites with autocomplete functions, they will make the process way faster, especially for the sites that we most usually work with. Also, taking into account that not many sites are compatible with passkeys to this day, password managers are not to be overlooked, even if it has been news at some point that cyber villains have hacked a service like this in the past (see what happened with LastPass).
Which one should I use?
Passkeys are generally considered more secure. Bullet-proof, given that something like your fingerprint is definitely difficult to steal. But the truth is not many sites allow for passkeys, so there will be many webs where we will need to keep using a password, and to manage them, a password manager will be good. It is true that many sites are integrating the login with Google or Apple, that does allow passkeys, but perhaps we do not want to use this option everytime, since we do not want Google to know about all of our activities online.
This means that using password will still be useful for years to come, and because of that, having a password manager installed and taking care of the master key will help us keep track of our credentials while keeping our privacy.
