Can You Share a Passkey? Yes, Here's Which Ones and How

By Kalpesh Mahida · Updated October 16, 2026

Can you share a passkey? Yes, most passkeys can be shared, as long as they live somewhere that can share them: iCloud Keychain on Apple devices, a password manager with shared vaults, or a team tool like Coauth. A passkey on a hardware security key, such as a YubiKey, can never be shared or copied. This guide shows which passkeys you can share, how to share one on iPhone and Mac, how to share one with a team, and what sharing changes about security.

Which passkeys you can share

A passkey is a private key, and where that key lives decides whether anyone else can use it.

• iCloud Keychain (iPhone, iPad, Mac): yes. Share passkeys with people in your contacts through a shared group, or send one with AirDrop. Everyone needs iOS 17, macOS Sonoma or later.
• A password manager with shared vaults: yes, inside that manager. Put the passkey in a vault or collection the other person can open.
• Coauth (desktop Chrome): yes. Share a passkey with a teammate by email, and they sign in with it from their own browser.
• Google Password Manager: it syncs passkeys to your own devices, and its family sharing covers passwords. To share a passkey with someone, use one of the options above.
• Windows Hello: a passkey saved only on one PC stays on that PC. Passkeys saved to Microsoft Password Manager sync to your own devices, which is not the same as sharing.
• A hardware security key, such as a YubiKey: no. The private key never leaves the key, by design.

Syncing is not sharing

A synced passkey follows you to your own phone, laptop and tablet through your Apple, Google or Microsoft account. Sharing is different: it gives the passkey to another person, so they can sign in to the account from their own device. Only some places do that, and usually only with people who use the same one.

How to share a passkey on iPhone or Mac

1. Open the Passwords app (on iOS 17, Settings, then Passwords).
2. Create a shared group and add the people you want, from your contacts.
3. Move the passkey into the group. Everyone in it can sign in with it from their own Apple devices.

To hand one passkey to someone nearby, share it with AirDrop instead. Both ways work only between Apple devices, and a passkey sits in one shared group at a time.

How to share a passkey with your team

Apple groups stop at Apple devices, and a password suite asks the whole team to adopt it. Coauth, the tool I build, is a Chrome extension that does one job: share logins, passwords and passkeys, with a team. It creates the passkey itself, as a software authenticator in the browser, and seals it to each teammate.

1. Install Coauth and set a vault password. Keep the recovery key it gives you; Windows Hello or Touch ID unlock is optional.
2. Add a new passkey for the account through Coauth. Coauth cannot import a passkey saved somewhere else, so you add a fresh one; many sites let an account have more than one.
3. Share it with a teammate by email. They get a link, join with a free Coauth account, and the passkey signs them in from their own browser.
4. Remove anyone who leaves. The team key rotates, so they cannot open anything shared from then on, and a shared passkey cannot be exported.

Coauth is free for one team of up to 3 people, then $5 a month flat, not per seat.

Is a shared passkey still safe?

Sharing does not weaken the passkey. Every person still signs in with a phishing-resistant credential that only works on the real site. What you give up is attribution: when several people use one passkey, the site cannot tell them apart. That is fine for a genuinely shared account, such as a team mailbox, a vendor dashboard or a service account, and wrong for anything that needs a record of who did what.

When you should not share a passkey

If each person needs their own access and audit trail, do not share. Give each user their own account and their own passkey. Share accounts that are genuinely one identity: a service account, a shared admin login for a small team, a short contract. Use it on purpose, not as the default.

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