by Dan Moren
Apple’s newest OSes will support passkey import/export standard
The import/export feature, which Apple demonstrated at this week’s Worldwide Developers Conference, will be available in the next major releases of iOS, macOS, iPadOS, and visionOS. It aims to solve one of the biggest shortcomings of passkeys as they have existed to date.
Yep, I’m back on the passkey beat! This is Apple’s implementation of the standard developed by the FIDO Alliance, which handles the specification for passkeys. The goal is to create a system more secure than just outputting a plaintext file full of your sensitive cryptographic keys and allow easy migration between password managers.
On the macOS Tahoe beta running on my MacBook Air, I can start the export process in Passwords, which requires first re-authenticating with Touch ID. You can choose to export either a single item or all your items; in the latter case, you can’t export accounts created with Sign in with Apple or those that were shared to a group by someone else, and exporting will not delete the items from Passwords itself.1
In order to complete the export, you need to select an app to send it to, but as most password managers have not yet implemented the standard, I don’t currently have any options available. 1Password said last fall that it intends to adopt the standard; they’ll likely be joined by other apps, and I wouldn’t be surprised if support rolls out more broadly right around the time macOS Tahoe is released this fall.
- Standard passwords can of course still be exported as a file, though the app warns you that they’ll be unencrypted. ↩