1Password—a popular password manager for iPhone, Mac, and other platforms—is adding support for recovery codes. This will make it easier to recover your account when you can’t remember your password.
Recovery codes will also help you get into your 1Password vault when you lose access to your secret key.
Recovery codes will make it easy to get back into your 1Password account
Almost all popular password managers support recovery codes, providing a backup way to log in when you can’t recall the password. 1Password was an outlier, though, as it required you to use your Secret key for additional authentication in such cases. The problem is that the Secret key is not easy to memorize, further complicating matters.
This changes with recovery code support. As long as you remember the email address associated with your 1Password account, you can use the recovery code to reclaim it.
After using the code, you must use a new password and download your new Secret key. Using the new Secret key, log back into your 1Password vault on a trusted device.
If you are a 1Password user, you must generate recovery codes through the mobile app or web. This is important as there’s no way to generate the codes after you lose access to your account. Once generated, save the codes in a safe, secure, and easily accessible place. Recovery codes are reusable even after you have used them once.
The only catch with recovery codes is that it will only work in 1Password on the web.
1Password still follows a multi-layered identity verification process
Family organizers in 1Password can still reset the account passwords of other users in the family. However, everyone in the plan will also have the option of generating recovery codes.
Despite the addition of recovery codes, 1Password assures in its announcement that all data saved in your vault will remain as secure as before. Besides recovery code, you must also verify your identity through email verification to reaccess your account.
Apple is introducing its own Passwords app with iOS 18 and macOS Sequoia later this year. However, 1Password remains a superior and more feature-rich password manager, and these additions will only make it better.
