FIDO Passwordless Standards to be Adopted by Top Tech Companies

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Top tech companies like Apple, Microsoft and Google have announced plan to further their support for a common passwordless sign-in standard. This has been developed by the FIDO alliance in association with the World Wide Web Consortium. The FIDO alliance (Fast Identity Online Alliance) was established in 2013 with a very concise mission: To help reduce the world’s crippling reliance on passwords.

In today’s digital world, with a plethora of online platforms available that require setting up profiles, it is inevitable that users end up keeping the same or slightly similar passwords. This puts not only one user account but all accounts of a particular user at risk. Moreover, legacy multi factor authentication like OTPs sent over SMS are prone to phishing attacks. FIDO Allinace has stated that the need for a sign-in technology that is more secure and convenient is the need of the hour.

This new technology of passworldless sign-in will let users take same actions that they take everyday to unlock their devices; fingerprint scanner on Android phones, Touch ID and Face ID on iPhones and device PINs, etc. This will make sign-ins more secure and will the authentication problem, one of the biggest security concerns on the internet.

These companies’ platforms already have the FIDO standards implemented in their platforms. But these previous implementations required users to manually sign-in to each app before they could use the passwordless functionality. As part of the new implementation that was recently announced, two new features have been added to the existing build.

The first feature will permit users to automatically access their FIDO sign-in credentials on other devices, even the new ones, without having to re-enroll every account. The second feature includes acapability that will enable users to use FIDO authentication on their mobile devices to sign in to an app or website on a nearby device, regardless of the OS platform or browser they are running.

Andrew Shikiar, executive director and CMO of the FIDO Alliance, expressed hope that these new capabilities will usher in a new era of low-friction FIDO implementations. “This will give service providers a full range of options for deploying modern, phishing-resistant authentication,” he said in a press statement.