The Twelve Days of Blog-mas: No.2 - Windows Web Sign in and Passwordless

Hi folks - welcome to the second post in the holiday '23 series.

Today's post is about a capability that came to preview long ago but recently surprised much of the world and moved to General Availability (GA).

This allows you to sign-in to a Windows PC itself via the familiar web sign in form/pop-up dialog box:

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With this sign-in method, you certainly can use your password but passwords are so ‘yesterday’ … Let’s go passwordless and use MS Authenticator - which can be a form of ‘multi-factor’ sign in.

• IMPORTANT: This sign in method is called ‘web sign in’ – if there is no ‘web,’ then there is no sign in (i.e. offline sign ins won’t work; there will be no cached credential locally for this sign in method).
  

Here are the high-level steps and a little animation of the experience on Windows 11 + MS Authenticator on iOS.

• From the PC:
  
  1. Select the ‘Sign in options’ link and select the ‘globe’ (web sign in)
     
  2. Select the ‘Sign in’ button
     
  3. Select ‘Send notification’ from the web pop-up
     

• From the phone
  
  1. You’ll be prompted to complete the MFA and passwordless sign-in via MS Authenticator (in my case, enter the number match + Touch ID)
     
  2. You’ll arrive on the desktop, signed in…
     

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For more information:

• Web sign-in for Windows - Windows Security | Microsoft Learn
  

Cheers - See you tomorrow!

Hilde

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