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Enterprise Passwordless Authentication Faces Significant Deployment Hurdles
Wednesday, December 31, 2025
What
Enterprises face significant challenges in implementing passwordless authentication, with a recent RSA report indicating 90% of security experts encounter deployment problems. This matters because the continued reliance on passwords, often due to legacy system incompatibility and complex hybrid environments, leaves organizations highly susceptible to data breaches from stolen credentials.
Where
Global enterprises, particularly those with OT environments, IoT devices, embedded Linux, and manufacturing systems, are affected.
When
Recently disclosed findings from the "ID IQ Report 2026" by RSA highlight these ongoing challenges.
Key Factors
- •A significant hurdle is the complexity of enterprise environments, requiring multiple passwordless solutions that can introduce new security gaps and making 100% coverage difficult, especially for OT and embedded systems.
- •The use of passwords as fallback mechanisms during registration and recovery processes for passkeys creates risky blind spots and expands the attack surface, undermining the core benefit of passwordless security.
- •Strategic implementation is crucial, with experts recommending prioritizing privileged users and critical systems for passwordless adoption before expanding to easier cloud services, and leveraging machine-generated temporary tokens for legacy systems.
Takeaways
- →Organizations should develop a phased passwordless strategy, starting with high-risk users and critical infrastructure before addressing less sensitive systems, to maximize security impact.
- →Ensure end-to-end phishing resistance in all enrollment, registration, and recovery processes for passwordless solutions to avoid reintroducing credential-based vulnerabilities.
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