Apple’s Recent Updates to Platform SSO: What Problems Will It Solve?

A frank look at where Platform SSO stands today, what's coming with macOS Tahoe 26, and the hard choices Mac administrators need to make

Picture this: It's Monday morning. An employee clicks on what looks like an important employment document, gets prompted for their credentials, and dutifully enters their username and password. Except it's not a legitimate document, it's a sophisticated phishing attack that just harvested their credentials.

This scenario plays out daily across organizations worldwide. The bad guys are getting better at being sophisticated with their attacks to get people to give up their passwords.

We tell users not to give their passwords to scammers, but it's getting harder to distinguish legitimate authentication prompts from malicious ones. The solution seems obvious: what if they don't have a password at all? Then they can't give it to scammers.

Welcome to the promise (and complexity) of Platform SSO.

The Current State of Platform SSO

Apple first introduced Platform SSO as part of an evolving strategy of helping Mac users obtain a single-sign on (SSO) token, in order to securely and conveniently access SSO-enabled apps and SSO-enabled websites.

Along