The FIDO Alliance is calling attention to the global spread of FIDO-certified login technology in its 2019 year-end progress report. The organization notes that nearly every major web browser – including Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Opera – introduced FIDO2 support in 2019, while FIDO’s WebAuthn API became an official W3C web standard.
FIDO2 also extended its reach across an enormous number of devices. The entire Android platform received certification earlier this year, bringing every Android device (or at least, any Android 7 device or later) under the FIDO umbrella. The same is true for Windows Hello, which brought FIDO support to any Windows 10 device.
Taken together, the certifications greatly expand the scope of the FIDO program, making it much easier for third parties to offer FIDO logins to their customers, while simultaneously making it easier for those customers to take advantage of strong passwordless security.
“The FIDO Alliance’s mission requires making FIDO a ubiquitous feature across all of the devices, operating systems and browsers we use every day. Given the platform enablement progress of this year, we are well on our way to that ubiquity,” said FIDO Executive Director and Chief Marketing Officer Andrew Shikiar.
Other 2019 highlights from the report include FIDO’s IoT and identity verification and binding initiatives. The organization formed an Identity Verification and Binding Working Group and an IoT Technical Working Group in an effort to reduce the reliance on passwords, facilitate account recovery, and shore up some of the security gaps with IoT technology.
Intuit, NTT DOCOMO, and LINE Pay were some of the many companies that began offering password-free authentication procedures to customers over the course of 2019. IBM, Jumio, Mitre, and Ping Identity were amongst the new members of the Alliance itself.
FIDO is hoping that its standards will continue to expand in 2020. The organization will also host its inaugural Authenticate conference in June.
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