Microsoft’s Bold Plan to Ditch Passwords in Windows 10

For as long as we’ve called for the death of the password, it’s still conspiring to make our lives both more complicated and less secure than they should be. In Windows 10, Microsoft will do its part to ease that particular pain. So long, random string of letters, characters, and numbers. Hello, well, Windows Hello.

Windows Hello, announced today on Microsoft’s blog, is an authentication system relies not on typing memorized gibberish but on face, eye, and fingerprint recognition. Unlocking your laptop or phone will be as simple as looking at or touching it.

Biometric solutions like this aren’t unique to Microsoft; Android has offered a Face Unlock feature since 2011, and fingerprint ID has been unlocking laptops and smartphones for years now. But the technology behind previous offerings—particularly facial recognition—has historically been lacking, and certainly not as ubiquitous as Windows Hello would be given the predominance of Windows machines in the world.

That’s not to say that Microsoft has necessarily gotten it right. There are signs, though, that Hello could succeed where others have muddled, particularly in its compatibility with Intel RealSense 3D cameras, a next-generation tech that can at the very least tell a human from a photo (a distinction with which early Face Unlock devices struggled). Better still? All of the data is stored locally, and not on some remote Microsoft server.

Once you’ve signed in with Windows Hello, Microsoft’s Passport technology will help beat back the password scourge throughout your computing experience. Once you’ve identified yourself with Hello (or a PIN of your device lacks biometric prowess), the operating system will authenticate apps and websites without sending a password at all. It won’t work on everything, but you should get more use out of it as companies and organizations continue enlist in the Fast Identity Online (FIDO) Alliance, a group dedicated to the eradication of passwords as we know them.

While Hello hasn’t yet trickled out to Windows 10 beta testers, we should be hearing more about how it works in practice soon. As long as it beats “typing the name of the street you grew up on,” we should be in good shape.