Awareness of the advantages of mobile-based biometric authentication continues to grow, and the past week has delivered a few important notable developments illustrating that trend, including a password manager’s embrace of 2FA and a major Japanese internet company’s support for passcodes.
With respect to the former, NordPass launched a new two-factor authentication feature for business users of its mobile app, effectively turning it into an authenticator app in addition to a password manager. Any account with 2FA enabled will prompt a user seeking access with a time-based one-time passcode (TOTP) that can only be unlocked with a biometric scan on the mobile device, enabling a high level of security.
The security system’s announcement came after NordPass enabled support for passkeys near the start of the year—which was itself another signal of growing support for the use of mobile biometrics to enhance authentication security. Passkeys essentially store a user’s passwords for various online accounts on the user’s mobile device, and lock them behind a biometric scan.
On that note, Yahoo! Japan became the latest major organization to enable support for passkeys this week. Originally formed through a partnership between Yahoo! and SoftBank, Yahoo! Japan is a major internet company in the country, and operates the second most popular search engine after Google. Its passkey support will enable end users to easily authenticate when logging into their accounts using their smartphone’s biometric systems or a PIN, replacing the SMS-based authentication that has so far prevailed for many users.
“Passkeys solve the usability issues that FIDO authentication has traditionally faced and dramatically improve users’ difficulties in using FIDO authentication,” said Yahoo! Japan ID Division VP Yuya Ito.
Beyond these announcements of support for mobile biometrics for everyday users, the week also brought an important development in the related field of selfie-based onboarding: Regula has combined its document reading SDK and facial recognition SDK into a unified, “single-vendor solution”. The solution delivers selfie-based identity verification supported by a recently updated Regula Document Reader solution that can automatically detect whether a photo in a given physical ID has been manipulated.
“The more separate technologies and products that need special configuration there are, the more chances that some parts of the IDV process could be neglected,” explained Regula CTO Ihar Kliashchou. “That is why we’re also witnessing a strong demand for a single-vendor solution when it comes to identity verification.”
Given the momentum that mobile-based biometric security is now enjoying, it seems that Regula should face a receptive market for its new identity verification solution.
Stay tuned to Mobile ID World for further updates on mobile biometrics and digital ID, which are sure to follow quickly in the days ahead.
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