Best practices for password optional

A list of recommended best practices for password-optional use cases using the Embedded SDK.

Add phone as an additional authenticator

The

Sign up for new account with email only

and

Sign in with email only

guides show you how to integrate password-optional sign-in flows in your app using only email. These guides are primarily meant to be learning tools to help you understand how to integrate password-optional use cases in your app. In reality, however, user emails change, get lost, become compromised, and may not be accessible during authentication. In these scenarios, supporting another recovery authenticator along with email gives users a fallback option to sign in to your app and avoid user lockout.

The phone authenticator is a popular and recommended alternative authenticator because it's easy to deploy, quick and seamless to use, and familiar for most users. To learn how to integrate the phone authenticator in your app, see the phone enrollment steps in the

Sign in with password and phone factors

guide.

Protect your admin accounts

Before you configure the password-optional experience, ensure that you continue to require valid two-factor authentication from your admin users. The Admin Console must remain accessible to your admin accounts.

• Change the Admin Console authentication policy to require any two factors rather than a password plus another factor. Disabling the password authenticator before you do this locks your admins out of the Admin Console.
• Create a separate group for admins and add your admin users to that group.
• Create separate authenticator enrollment, global session, and authentication policies for this group. Each policy should require two non-password factors.
• Place this group at the highest priority (at number one) in the authenticator enrollment policy.
• Ensure that any existing account being promoted to an admin user has the required credentials already set up to access the Admin Console.