Telegram is no stranger to bad news when it comes to security. Whether that’s malware, its lack of full encryption, or its alleged black market shop window for criminals and terrorists. The latest being the FT linking Telegram CEO Pavel Durov to Jan Marsalek, “Europe’s most-wanted financial criminal — and most-hunted Russian spy.”
But at least Telegram’s billion users are now safer from attacks, password theft, multi-factor authentication bypasses and data breaches. Telegram has finally added passkeys for all iPhone and Android users. You should add one right away.
All other popular messaging platforms — iMessage, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and Google Messages already link to accounts that can be protected by passkeys.
“With a passkey,” Telegram says, “you can log in to your device simply by entering a PIN code or biometric data like your Face ID or fingerprint scan.”
Telegram security is built around SMS codes — which is all bad news. It’s an insecure technology carried over insecure networks and easy to intercept or bypass. “Passkeys are an additional login method that can be used instead of SMS to instantly enter your account – even if you are traveling or don’t have SMS service.”
That doesn’t change linking Telegram to a phone number. “Passkeys are more secure than SMS codes, helping protect users from unauthorized access to their account,” but Telegram says “you can still request an SMS code in order to log in – so always make sure your account uses an up-to-date phone number that is controlled by you.”
Passkeys link account credentials to hardware authenticated by you. They can’t be stolen, bypassed, intercepted or even shared by users falling for socially engineered attacks. They can be stored in your password manager and used cross-platform.
None of this changes Telegram’s core downside — chats are not end-to-end encrypted by default, and are therefore always at risk of compromise. This was highlighted when Durov was arrested in France and quickly changed his stance on user privacy.
My recommendation remains to use WhatsApp as a daily messenger. Albeit there is one area where Telegram does outshine the rest — anonymity. If that’s your key requirement, then this bête noire of the messaging world is hard to beat.
