Safe Passkeys: Smooth Onboarding To Every Dapp

We’re excited to announce Safe Passkeys, a plugin allowing developers to offer Safe Smart Accounts secured using Passkeys. Users no longer need to write down nor remember complex private keys; instead, they can effortlessly access their accounts using their device's existing authentication system. Passkeys are backed up via their preferred method, be it Apple’s iCloud Keychain, Google’s Password Manager, or other cross-platform password managers like Proton Pass and Bitwarden.

We’ve reimagined the Ethereum account experience, helping them reach their full potential as free, self-custodial and open-source digital accounts. We believe crypto account security should be universally accessible, eliminating complex setups without compromising on self-custody and user experience.

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What is a Passkey?

A Passkey is an authentication method that completely eliminates the need for passwords. By leveraging the cryptographic features of devices like fingerprint, face recognition, or a PIN, Passkeys offer a phishing-resistant alternative to traditional passwords. It is developed by the FIDO Alliance, a collaborative effort involving several tech companies. Passkeys adhere to the security standards of WebAuthn, a web standard that harnesses public key cryptography. As a result, they serve as a battle tested authentication solution for various applications, not limited to web3.

The freedom to choose

Passkeys are now widely available across different devices, operating systems, browsers, and password managers. Users can easily store and manage passkeys on any browser, giving users the choice of what platform to use.

Safe Passkeys Plugin

Ethereum EOA (Externally Owned Accounts) rely on a specific public key cryptography that necessitates users to backup recovery phrases. In contrast, Smart Accounts can leverage programmable logic to validate various cryptographic methods, including the one employed by Passkeys, ensuring secure account ownership and enabling transaction signing.

Safe Passkeys serves as a validation module to Safe Smart Account. It brings the elliptic curve secp256r1 onchain, the same cryptographic algorithm used in Passkeys, to validate account security and facilitate transaction signing.

Open source and audits

The module contracts are developed by the Safe Protocol Team and will undergo rigorous audits and formal verification of critical code components before its production release. The plugin is integrated in a special experimental release in Candide’s open source AbstractionKit SDK, so you will be able verify the security of the code we utilize, just as you can with all our Atelier libraries and infrastructure.

Simple, one-click signups

Passkeys simplify the user onboarding by giving the option to sign up with a single click or tap, making passkeys the most secure and convenient method for anyone to swiftly login to your application. Additionally, within the Account Abstraction stack, gas fees incurred during signups can be seamlessly covered by a third-party Paymaster. This eliminates the requirement for users to acquire ETH before accessing and using your application.

Getting Started

To support developers in building smart account experiences, we’re excited to share that Candide is bringing the Safe Passkeys to its sdk AbstractionKit. This will help accelerate the adoption of secure and user friendly account creation with Passkeys and help make onchain onboarding easier and faster.

AbstractionKit is a typescript library to build smart account experiences, such as instant smart account creation within a dapp using just a passkey – no app downloads, extensions, or seed phrases required.

During the testnet phase for Safe Passkeys, developers will be able to craft their user experiences by offering account creation with Safe Passkeys for easy and secure signing. Developers can already leverage existing first-class features such as Safe multisig support, email auth, gas sponsorship and batch transactions. As we approach mainnet release, developers can seamlessly transition to production versions, and gain access to advanced recovery mechanisms, including onchain account recovery using guardians.

For detailed documentation on Safe Passkeys, visit docs.candide.dev/wallet/plugins/passkeys

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¹FIDO Alliance, like its name suggests, is an alliance involving Apple, Google, Microsoft, Yubico and others with a mission to reduce the world’s reliance on passwords. Learn more on FIDO and its work on Passkeys on fidoalliance.org/passkeys/^‍

²WebAuthn is a core component of the FIDO Project and is used as the standard to build Passkeys implementations across different platforms. Learn more about WebAuthn on wikipedia.org/wiki/WebAuthn‍

³To see a list of different device and browser support, visit passkeys.dev/device-support. A non-exclusive list of password managers that supports Passkeys recovery are Bitwarden, ProtonPass, 1Password, Window Hello, iCloud Keychain, and Google Password Manager.

⁴Secp256r1 is a public key cryptographic that is used in the WebAuthn standard. It is different from the default cryptographic curve to validate signatures on Bitcoin and Ethereum, which is Secp256k1.

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Safe Passkeys: Smooth Onboarding To Every Dapp

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