Sponsor Keynote: Passwordless Authentication Is a Matter of Digital Sovereignty

Passkeys have emerged as the standard for passwordless authentication, the technology replacing passwords across the web. But the real question isn't whether they're secure, it's where they're stored and who controls them.

A passkey is essentially a file, and whoever syncs it holds your identity. Today that's mostly Apple or Google: Google's passkeys aren't end-to-end encrypted and depend on your account staying in good standing; Apple's are encrypted but locked to a closed consumer ecosystem with no B2B management. Both put European identities under US platform control.

The answer isn't to reject passkeys. It's to store them ourselves: with European providers that sync them end-to-end encrypted, under European jurisdiction.

Passkeys are the files that hold our future digital identity. We should store them in Europe.