Federal authentication standards and major platform shifts have made passkeys the default login method for most consumer and enterprise accounts, pushing traditional password managers toward obsolescence. The FIDO2 protocol, backed by the W3C’s WebAuthn specification and endorsed by both NIST and CISA as the only widely available phishing-resistant authentication method, now ships natively in every major browser and operating system. For the growing number of users whose accounts rely on public-key credentials instead of shared secrets, the password manager has become a solution to a problem that no longer exists.
Federal Standards Now Demand Phishing-Resistant Login
The clearest signal that passwords are losing their official standing comes from NIST Special Publication 800-63B, the primary federal technical standard for digital identity. In its current 800-63-4 edition, the standard requires that verifiers at Authenticator Assurance Level 2 (AAL2) must offer a phishing-resistant authentication option. AAL3, the highest tier, goes further: it demands non-exportable private keys and full phishing resistance. These are not aspirational goals. They are compliance requirements that federal agencies and their contractors must meet, and they describe exactly what passkeys deliver through asymmetric cryptography rather than what password managers protect through encrypted vaults of shared secrets.
CISA reinforces this direction in its own guidance. The agency states plainly that “not all MFA is equal” and identifies FIDO/WebAuthn as the only widely available phishing-resistant method because it blocks credential entry on impostor sites by binding each login to a specific web domain. Password managers can autofill credentials on the correct domain, but they still transmit a reusable secret to a server. That distinction matters: a phished password is a compromised password, regardless of how securely it was stored. CISA’s Hybrid Identity Solutions Guidance explicitly assesses FIDO2 roaming authenticators as phishing resistant in compliance contexts and maps FIDO2 to AAL2, with possible AAL3 depending on implementation. When the federal government builds its security architecture around a technology that eliminates shared secrets, the rationale for managing those secrets weakens considerably.
How Passkeys Eliminate the Problem Managers Were Built to Solve
Password managers exist because humans cannot reliably generate, remember, or rotate dozens of unique, complex strings. Passkeys dissolve that entire burden. The FIDO2 protocol, composed of the W3C’s WebAuthn standard and the FIDO Alliance’s Client to Authenticator Protocol (CTAP), replaces the password with a public-key credential pair. The private key never leaves the user’s device. Biometric verification, such as a fingerprint or face scan, stays entirely local. No secret crosses the network, so there is nothing for an attacker to intercept, replay, or stuff into a credential list harvested from a breach. The server stores only a public key, which is useless without its private counterpart locked inside the user’s hardware.
This architecture removes the central risk that password managers try to mitigate but cannot fully eliminate. Even the best-encrypted vault is still a centralized store of reusable secrets. If a vault is breached, or if a user falls for a convincing phishing page that requests their master password, every credential inside becomes exposed. Passkeys sidestep that threat model entirely. Academic work on WebAuthn-style authenticators, such as research presented at the USEC symposium and accessible via its digital object identifier, has emphasized that origin binding and challenge-response flows dramatically reduce the attack surface compared with passwords. Most professionals manage accounts spanning banking, social media, shopping, and workplace tools. For all of those categories, the shift from memorized or vaulted strings to device-bound cryptographic keys represents a structural improvement in both security and convenience.
The Messy Middle (Recovery Still Leans on Passwords)
None of this means the transition is seamless. The FIDO Alliance’s own white paper series on passkey deployment acknowledges that account recovery often involves scenarios where passwords persist. A user who loses their phone, breaks their laptop, or needs to set up a new device may still encounter a fallback flow that asks for a traditional password or a recovery code. That residual dependency creates a hybrid state, and hybrid states carry their own risks. Users who believe they have fully migrated to passkeys may neglect the strength or uniqueness of the legacy password sitting behind their recovery flow. An attacker who cannot phish a passkey can still target the forgotten password reset link or exploit a weak knowledge-based verification process.
This tension deserves honest attention rather than dismissal. Partial migrations can produce a false sense of security. If a service supports passkeys for daily login but still accepts a weak password as a recovery backstop, the account’s actual security ceiling is set by the weakest link, not the strongest. The practical consequence for readers is straightforward: before deleting a password manager, audit every account to confirm that passkey-only authentication is fully supported, including recovery. Where it is not, the old credential still needs protection. In regulated environments, that assessment should align with broader compliance frameworks; for example, systems seeking cloud authorization under federal risk and authorization programs are expected to demonstrate that their identity stacks follow current NIST guidance rather than relying on legacy password-centric flows.
Why Keeping a Vault “Just in Case” Can Create New Risk
A common counterargument holds that users should maintain a password manager alongside passkeys as a safety net. That logic has a flaw. Every active vault is an attack surface. Research and incident reports have repeatedly shown that browser-integrated managers and autofill features can be abused by malicious scripts or deceptive iframes. Even when vendors patch specific bugs, the underlying reality remains: a password manager aggregates high-value secrets behind a single point of failure. In contrast, passkeys distribute risk across hardware-backed keys, often validated by modules that must comply with the cryptographic module validation requirements that federal systems use to evaluate underlying cryptography.
Regulators have long recognized the systemic danger of shared secrets. A decade ago, the federal government used the Federal Register to formalize requirements for stronger electronic authentication in public-sector services, laying groundwork that later standards like 800-63B would refine into explicit phishing-resistance criteria. In that context, choosing to keep a large password vault “just in case” runs against the grain of where both technology and policy are headed. A smaller, tightly controlled set of legacy credentials—maintained only for accounts that genuinely cannot move to passkeys yet—reduces exposure compared with an ever-growing vault synchronized across browsers and devices. As more services adopt passkeys as a primary login and align their recovery processes accordingly, the most secure strategy is not to double down on password management, but to deliberately shrink the role passwords play in your digital life until they are the exception rather than the rule.
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*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
