Phishing-Resistant by Default: What Microsoft’s Passkey Shift Means for You with Nathan McNulty (Patriot Consulting) and Eric Woodruff (Semperis)

 

Passkeys are now the default authentication method in Entra ID. If you’re responsible for Entra ID identity, the question you face is not “Should I care about passkeys?” but “How do I move forward without breaking the user experience—or the business?”

This episode features Nathan McNulty, Principal Security Solutions Architect at Patriot Consulting, and Eric Woodruff, Chief Identity Architect at Semperis, who explain Microsoft’s September 1 change and the looming retirement of SMS and voice in February 2027. They uncover the quirks of registration campaigns, debate the tradeoffs between device-bound and synced passkeys, and emphasize that passkeys only protect users once weaker fallback methods are removed. They close with a new risk: attackers registering their own passkeys to keep access to an account.