Seamless, secure passwordless auth platform

Passwordless authentication is a method of confirming a user’s identity without passwords. Instead of relying on something the user knows (a password), passwordless methods authenticate based on what the user has (a device, an email account, an authenticator app), or who the user is (biometrics). This eliminates credential-based attack vectors while reducing signup and login friction.

Passwords create friction for users and increase risk for your application. Users who have to create, remember, and manage passwords are more likely to abandon onboarding or reuse weak credentials across services.

For your team, password-based authentication means building and maintaining reset flows, expiration and strength policies, and help desk support. Passwordless methods reduce that overhead while addressing the attack surfaces that credential stuffing, brute force, and phishing target.

Descope supports:

• Passkeys

• Magic links and enchanted links

• Social login (OAuth)

• One-time passwords (OTP) over email and SMS

• Authenticator apps (TOTP)

• Google One Tap

• nOTP (WhatsApp)

You can deploy any combination of these methods and modify them without touching your codebase using Descope Flows, or get hands-on with the SDKs or REST API.

Yes. Descope can augment your existing authentication system by adding passwordless methods through OIDC federation. This means you can layer passkeys, magic links, or other methods on top of your current identity provider without migrating your user store or changing your primary auth flow/provider.

A full migration path is available from all existing auth or identity providers, should your organization choose that route in the future.

Passwordless methods eliminate the most exploited attack vector in authentication: credentials. The Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report discovered that 88% of attacks against Basic Web Applications involved the use of stolen credentials.

Without passwords to steal, stuff, or phish, threat actors can’t exploit this vulnerable attack surface. Methods like passkeys go a step further by using cryptographic key pairs bound to a specific domain, making them resistant to phishing and replay attacks (where attackers reuse intercepted authentication data).

Yes. Descope Flows support A / B testing (also known as split testing) through a built-in testing key randomly assigned to each user. You can route different segments of your traffic through different authentication paths and measure results with Descope’s Flow Analytics dashboard. 

This provides valuable insights into conversion rates across methods, testing progressive profiling strategies, or piloting passwordless with a subset of users before a full rollout. 

Yes. Descope Flows let you chain multiple authentication methods together in a single journey. For example, you can use a magic link as the primary factor and an authenticator app as a second factor. Or, offer passkeys as the default with OTP as a fallback for devices that don’t support WebAuthn.

These flows can all be configured visually in Descope Flows and updated without code changes.

Descope supports progressive enrollment, which allows you to phase in passwordless methods alongside your existing password-based auth. During the transition, Descope merges user identities across authentication methods so users retain a single account regardless of which method they use. 

You can control the rollout pace and target specific user segments using conditional logic (A / B testing) in Descope Flows.