Learn how Passkey Intelligence from Corbado Connect automatically optimizes authentication flows for a seamless user experience, boosting adoption and security.
Try our demo application to see how Corbado Connect integrates passkeys into your application.
Passkey Intelligence is designed to maximize the benefits of passkey adoption across all industries by driving the Passkey Flywheel: higher creation, more usage, and fewer errors.
Metric / Goal | Without Corbado | With Corbado | Business Outcome |
---|---|---|---|
Passkey Creation Rate | 15% | 50-80% (x4) | More users enroll passkeys, reducing friction and increasing return visits. |
Passkey Usage Rate | 5% | 40-60% (x10) | Fewer drop-offs at login, higher engagement, and improved user satisfaction. |
Passkey Error Rate | 20% Login Errors | <2% Login Errors (95% of dead-ends avoided) | Fewer “I can’t log in” cases, lower support costs, and less user frustration. |
This flywheel effect (Higher Creation → More Usage → Fewer Errors) leads to higher user retention, more successful logins, and reduced operational support costs regardless of your product category.
Delaying the implementation of an intelligence layer may seem tempting, but real-world data shows that users in any type of application quickly encounter confusing dead-ends without it:
Passkey Intelligence helps avoid these pitfalls by detecting risky contexts ahead of time and guiding users toward the path most likely to succeed, no matter what type of application or service you provide.
Passkey Intelligence is a smart authentication logic layer provided by Corbado Connect that optimizes when and how passkeys are used in your application. It ensures a smooth user experience by only initiating passkey login or creation ceremonies when success is likely, and by gracefully falling back when not.
By leveraging a wealth of signals from the user’s device, behavior, and environment, Passkey Intelligence dynamically adapts the authentication flow to each situation, boosting both security and user convenience. In short, Passkey Intelligence is the engine that makes high passkey adoption possible – providing one-tap logins, seamless cross-device sign-ins, and context-aware prompts that significantly improve the user experience.
At its core, Passkey Intelligence acts as a prediction and decision engine determining the optimal authentication path for each login or signup attempt. It continuously aggregates multiple data points to assess whether a passkey can or should be used on the current device. Key factors include:
localStorage
) after a successful passkey login. This tells the front-end that “this user does have a passkey on this device” for subsequent visits, allowing the UI to directly offer a one-tap passkey login without additional server checks.Using this data, the intelligence engine dynamically chooses one of several paths for the user’s session: it might automatically initiate a platform passkey authentication, present a One-Tap Passkey login button (prefilled with the user’s identifier), fall back to a password/OTP flow, or even trigger a cross-device login via QR code if no local credentials are available. The goal is to always select the least friction path that still ensures a successful, secure login.
Implementing Passkey Intelligence yields significant benefits in both user experience and security outcomes:
The following diagram illustrates how Passkey Intelligence decides whether to start a passkey ceremony or immediately fall back to a classic authentication flow. Its two guiding principles remain the same: maximize successful passkey logins (green path) and minimize failed or confusing experiences (red path).
When the green path is chosen, users experience a friction-free, biometric login. If the red fallback path is triggered, they are guided through the familiar password / 2-factor flow, ensuring they never reach a dead-end.
clientState
Management: After a successful passkey operation, Corbado returns a clientState
string containing encrypted, environment-related information. This state is stored in the browser’s localStorage
to remember the user’s context, such as device capabilities and passkey availability. By passing this clientState
back into UI components in future sessions, you enable faster load times and more seamless flows, like One-Tap login, without repeating environment checks. Learn more about how to manage clientState
.One of the flagship features enabled by Passkey Intelligence is One-Tap Login. It’s a mechanism that allows returning users to authenticate with a single tap (plus a biometric check) without needing to re-enter their identifier like an email address.
This is achieved via a dynamic One-Tap Passkey Button that is intelligently displayed to users who have used a passkey before on their device. This transforms the login experience into a simple, fast, and secure action. Because it’s so easy, it’s a powerful tool for boosting passkey adoption.
To learn more about how it works and its benefits, see our dedicated page on One-Tap Login.
Integrating Passkey Intelligence into your authentication flows can be done in a couple of patterns, depending on your UI/UX approach. Corbado supports both Identifier-First (Automatic) flows and Explicit Passkey Button flows.
In this approach, the user first enters an identifier (like email or username) and then the system decides whether to trigger a passkey prompt automatically. Once the user submits their identifier, Corbado’s engine evaluates if a passkey login should be initiated right away. If yes, the passkey WebAuthn ceremony is auto-launched. If no, the flow silently falls back to the next step (e.g., asking for a password or sending an OTP). This conditional logic means you “auto-login” with passkey when possible, but never at the cost of user confusion.
Many applications opt to show a “Login with Passkey” button as an alternative to the traditional login form. Passkey Intelligence augments this approach with the One-Tap Passkey Button component. Initially, you might display a normal “Use passkey” button. But once a user becomes eligible for a passkey, the component automatically switches to the One-Tap mode on subsequent visits. This means the next time that user comes back, they’ll see a personalized passkey login prompt (e.g. “Login with passkey for alice@example.com”) right up front.
Passkey Intelligence also enhances the account creation process to boost passkey enrollment. When a new user signs up or when an existing user logs in with a password, Corbado can intelligently prompt them to create a passkey.
You can configure how this happens. For example, some services choose to automatically initiate passkey creation immediately after a standard login on a supported device. However, you might prefer to first show an explanation screen before creating the passkey. Corbado’s components offer customizable passkey enrollment screens that you can enable or skip. You can even tailor these based on device type.
When using Passkey Intelligence, the flow of creating a passkey and subsequently using it is optimized end-to-end.
If a user is on a passkey-capable device and authenticates via a non-passkey method (like a password), the intelligence engine can immediately guide them into creating a passkey. One option is Automatic Passkey Creation, where the passkey ceremony starts without the user explicitly clicking anything, often right after they log in for the first time.
If you prefer a more explicit opt-in, you can disable automatic creation and use Passkey Explainer screens. Corbado’s UI components include an Append Passkey Prompt – a modal or page shown after sign-up/login that explains passkey benefits and asks the user to continue to set one up. Either way, once the user agrees, the WebAuthn create()
call is executed and the new passkey is stored by the user’s device (in their platform authenticator or manager).
After a passkey is created, using it in subsequent logins should be effortless. Modern browsers implement what’s known as Conditional UI, which is essentially a built-in autofill for passkeys. If a site is set up correctly, the browser might show a “Use your passkey for example.com” prompt or account chooser automatically when the login form is displayed.
Passkey Intelligence works hand-in-hand with such browser features. However, where Conditional UI is not supported or ignored by the user, Corbado’s One-Tap Passkey Button ensures a one-tap option is always visible in the UI itself for returning users. The intelligence engine effectively pre-fills the user’s identifier into this button using data stored from their last passkey login. It’s akin to the “Remember me” function but for passkeys – the user doesn’t even have to type their email; the button itself shows the account that will sign in with a biometric check.