FIDO U2F Standard Catching On With Non-Members

Bitbucket, GitLab, Sentry, FastMail, and IBM’s Compose have all embraced U2F

More than a dozen companies are now supporting the FIDO Alliance’s U2F authentication standards, and many aren’t even stakeholders in the organization.

YubiKey hardware keys are used to enable FIDO U2F authentication.

In recent weeks, Bitbucket, GitLab, Sentry, FastMail, and IBM’s Compose have all embraced U2F, and what’s more, none of these companies are FIDO members. As Yubico’s John Fontana points out on his company’s blog, “Their sole motivation was finding and adopting the best authentication technology to help users protect their accounts.”

That’s good news for Yubico, whose YubiKey hardware keys are used to enable FIDO U2F authentication by requiring that users physically confirm their devices are in use for authentication transactions. But it’s also good news for users of the participating services, given the increased security that FIDO U2F authentication affords.

Looking ahead, Fontana notes that Mozilla is working to bring U2F support to its Mozilla browser and that it plans to support the WebAuthn APIs currently under development by the World Wide Web Consortium, which will support FIDO standards; and Microsoft’s Edge browser is also going to support those APIs. That should lead to even stronger user security in the near future.