Third-Party Risk Assessment for Passwordless Authentication

Passwordless authentication is reshaping how systems verify identity. It removes the risk of stolen credentials, but it also shifts the attack surface. Third-party services—SDKs, identity providers, device authenticators—now hold critical trust positions in your architecture. If one of them is compromised, the chain breaks.

A third-party risk assessment for passwordless authentication starts with mapping every external dependency in the authentication flow. List the vendors, libraries, APIs, and identity brokers that touch user login. Examine their security documentation, compliance certifications, and recent incident history. Check if they offer strong key management, encrypted data transit, and verified device attestation.

Evaluate how each integration handles MFA challenges, cryptographic protocols, and user session lifecycles. Ensure open standards like WebAuthn and FIDO2 are implemented correctly, with no fallback to weak credentials. Review source code where possible. Monitor updates and patches; unmaintained components become threat vectors.

Test isolation boundaries. A single misconfigured API can allow privilege escalation across services. Require signed responses from identity providers. Confirm that every system validating authentication data enforces strict origin checks.

Operational security is not static. Automate monitoring for certificate expirations, endpoint changes, and unexpected traffic patterns. Create contingency plans for rapid vendor replacement if a breach occurs.

Passwordless authentication reduces certain attack classes, but the trust you place in your providers is a new form of vulnerability. Assess that trust continuously, and make it part of your deployment pipeline.

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