In the top menu of this site under Security, you can find FIDO2-related blog posts which I wrote in the past.īut we need to authenticate at least once before we are able as an end user to register these passwordless authentication methods. FIDO2 makes use of a public/ private key pair for authentication. They need to be connected to the device on which you authenticate, via USB, NFC or Bluetooth. The FIDO2 security keys are hardware keys, that come in different form-factors, from different vendors. Passwordless authentication methodsįor Azure AD (Office 365) accounts we currently have passwordless authentication methods like FIDO2 security keys and passwordless phone sign-in. So I setup a new user in my tenant and started testing multiple scenarios. I wondered how the experience is on different OS platforms and what the best experience is for the end user. I wondered if it is now really possible to create a new (Azure AD) user and have the user onboarded without providing the user’s password. On Windows, I mostly use my security key and when authentication is needed in a mobile app I use the Authenticator app.īut I registered these passwordless authentication methods when I still used my password for sign-in, on my existing user account. The combination of the use of security keys and the Authenticator app with phone sign-in allows me to sign in to Office on any platform I use. For this to work, I registered some FIDO2 security keys and registered my account in the Microsoft Authenticator app (and turned on phone sign-in).

I changed my password to something hard to remember and since then signed in to my Office 365 account without my password. I’ve been using my Azure AD account without a password I guess for about a year now.

Onboarding a passwordless Office 365 user, is that possible? That was the question I recently asked myself.

Microsoft passwordless account