Google’s Advanced Protection Program will soon support passkeys

Abner Li | May 2 2024 - 5:00 am PT

To mark World Password Day, Google is highlighting its progress on passkeys, which will soon work with the Advanced Protection Program (APP).

Google says “passkeys have been used to authenticate users more than 1 billion times across over 400 million Google Accounts.” Support in Android and Chrome started rolling at the end of 2022, while Google Accounts added sign-in support last year and is encouraging adoption.

In the past 12 months, more third-parties have introduced support, including Amazon, Docusign, Kayak, Mercari, and Shopify. Meanwhile, 1Password and Dashlane are taking advantage of the passkey APIs on Android and other operating systems.

Meanwhile, Google shared today that the Advanced Protection Program will soon support passkeys to “help reduce the barrier of entry to APP while still providing phishing resistant authentication.”

These high-risk users (campaign workers and candidates, journalists, human rights workers, etc.) will “have the option to enroll with any passkey in addition to using their hardware security keys.” Additionally:

They will also have the choice to use their passkeys as a sole factor or along with a password.

The last announcement today is how Cross-Account Protection, which “shares security notifications about suspicious events on your Google Account” with your third-party apps, is getting “additional collaborations.”

Doing this will allow the other apps and services connected to your Google Account to use our security information to better protect your other accounts. This is a critical benefit since cybercriminals often use an initial entry point as a foothold to gain access to more of your information.