Authentication & passkeys

Authentication is where most account takeovers are won or lost — and where customer friction does the most damage to revenue. The category is moving in one direction: away from shared secrets (passwords, SMS codes that fall to SIM swap) toward phishing-resistant passkeys bound to the device and the domain.

The hard part in CIAM isn’t the cryptography, it’s applying it to customers who never asked for friction. That’s what adaptive, risk-based MFA solves: challenge only when signals (new device, impossible travel, a breached password) cross a threshold, and reserve step-up for sensitive actions rather than every login.

These guides rank the methods by real-world strength and walk through rolling MFA and passwordless out without bleeding sign-ups — including the recovery and fallback paths a vendor demo usually skips.