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

This post has been republished via RSS; it originally appeared at: Microsoft Tech Community - Latest Blogs - .

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:

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…

For more information:

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

Cheers - See you tomorrow!

Hilde