---
title: Imagining A Passwordless Future
description: Can we replace passwords with something more user-friendly?
date: 2021-04-30
draft: true
dropcap: 'ascender'
---

import Sidenote from '@components/Sidenote.astro';

Passwords are the *worst*.

How many times have you groaned becuase *yet another* password-related thing
was messed up? Forgotten passwords, passwords that you're *sure* you wrote
down but can't find for some reason, passwords that you definitely *did* make
a record of but the site is inexplicably refusing to accept, passwords that
get silently truncated because your bank is still using 3DES for some reason,
the list goes on. It's constant point of pain for almost everyone, and even
after 20+ years of trying to make it work we *still* haven't figured out a
foolproof method. Password managers help, but they aren't perfect. How many
times have you created a password for a new account somewhere, saved it, and
then discovered that your save didn't go through - maybe it didn't meet the
requirements (because your 24-character string of gibberish didn't includ a s
p e c i a l   c h a r a c t e r), or maybe your cable box got hit by
lightning just as you clicked Save, or *whatever*. The fact is that passwords
are a pain, and it seems to be a pretty intractable problem.

You know what aren't a pain, or at least not nearly to the same extent? Keys.
That's right, physical stick-em-in-a-lock-and-turn metal keys. They've been
around since forever,<Sidenote>This is an example sidenote.</Sidenote>
and I doubt they'll be going anywhere any time soon.

I really hate passwords.

I use them, of course, because I can't not. And I use a password manager, because to my mind that's the current best compromise between being secure and absolutely losing your mind, but it still isn't great. Sometimes my password manager bugs out and refuses to auto-fill the password box, so I have to go hunt it down and copy-paste it in.<Sidenote>If I'm lucky. If I'm unlucky, the site will have disabled pasting into password inputs because "security," and I'm stuck having to type in a 16-character string of gibberish on a mobile phone, because that's how life is.</Sidenote> Other times I'll create a password, the password manager will happily file it away, and then I'll discover that it didn't meet the site's requirements,<Sidenote>Another test</Sidenote> because my auto-generated gibberish string didn't include the *right* special characters, and now I have the wrong password saved.
