What struck me first while going through RSA’s announcement at the Gartner IAM Summit is how directly it answers the long-standing complaint in the security world that passwordless, for all its hype, remained fragmented and oddly incomplete. You don’t often see a vendor talk about desktop logon with the same enthusiasm they reserve for cloud identity, yet here RSA leans into the unglamorous but critical gaps that have quietly caused most “passwordless initiatives” to stall out. It’s a bit refreshing, honestly, to see someone acknowledge that if users are still typing passwords into their laptops every morning, the whole concept starts to feel like marketing fluff.
RSA’s framing is admittedly bold—they position themselves as the only vendor delivering passwordless “every user, every environment, every time”—but the details support that confidence more than expected. The push into contactless desktop authentication through the NFC-enabled iShield Key 2 feels engineered specifically for industries that can’t afford friction: think nurses logging into shared workstations with gloved hands, field workers moving between terminals, or anyone who won’t tolerate fiddling with physical inserts. A simple tap-and-go motion may sound small, yet it’s exactly the kind of detail that determines whether passwordless succeeds or gets quietly abandoned by users who revert to shortcuts.
The attention to offline logon is another practical nod to reality. Enterprises love cloud identity until the Wi-Fi drops, and then suddenly the entire architecture wobbles. RSA adding offline FIDO2, OTP, and upcoming offline QR support acknowledges that zero-trust architecture still needs to function when the network doesn’t behave. It’s a subtle admission that “local-first identity” still matters.
The proximity verification arriving in January 2026 is an interesting twist—Bluetooth-based checks to ensure the authenticating device is actually near the machine requesting access. It’s almost a counter-phishing mechanism adapted for the desktop world, and it hints at RSA’s broader narrative: passwordless must not only replace passwords but be meaningfully *stronger* than them.
And yes, macOS admins finally get equal treatment. Bringing unified passwordless logon to both Windows and macOS may seem overdue, but this is where enterprises often stumble—consistency across user groups reduces helpdesk overhead more than any glossy dashboard.
The larger architectural glue here is RSA ID Plus and RSA ID Plus for Microsoft M1. These platforms aim to inject passwordless and modern MFA into all the places Entra ID still struggles to reach: mainframes, older OS versions, OT systems, legacy datacenter apps, non-Microsoft stacks. It’s almost a bridge for organizations with messy, hybrid identity ecosystems—which is to say, nearly everyone.
Where the announcement feels most forward-leaning is in the high-assurance space. The iShield Key 2’s compliance footprint—FIPS 140-3, EO 14028, OMB M-22-09, M-24-14—aligns straight with government and critical infrastructure checklists. Add MIFARE physical access plus field-updatable firmware and it becomes clear RSA is building a token designed to survive the next zero-day rather than crumble under it.
The expanded API support for embedding passkey workflows into custom portals is an under-the-radar win. Enterprises often want passwordless for their external ecosystems—partners, contractors, customers—but the UX has historically been clumsy. A tighter developer-ready layer suggests RSA is finally taking the “passwordless everywhere” promise seriously.
Then there’s the ISPM piece—Identity Security Posture Management. It continues the industry-wide shift toward using AI not only to authenticate users but to map the identity attack surface, surface misconfigurations, and detect creeping risk before incidents occur. It feels like RSA acknowledging that authentication alone no longer defines identity security; posture and continuous assessment are becoming just as essential.
The overall impression is that RSA is not merely iterating; it’s trying to reclaim a leadership role by stitching together all the neglected corners of passwordless. It’s less about a shiny new feature and more about shoring up the foundation so that enterprises can actually deploy passwordless at scale without tripping over operational edge cases. In a landscape littered with partial solutions and overspecialized vendors, this breadth may be what ultimately sets them apart—even if the execution will be the real test once organizations start rolling it out across thousands of endpoints.
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