The FIDO Alliance has further burnished the reputations of its UAF 1.1 and CTAP with important new certifications from the International Telecommunication Union’s Telecommunication Standardization Sector, or ITU-T.

The ITU is the United Nations’ ICT-focused agency, with ITU-T being its standardization arm. FIDO’s UAF 1.1 and CTAP specifications have now been accepted into the ‘ITU-T Recommendations’, which are established by ITU-T Study Group 17.

FIDO UAF 1.1 has become Recommendation ITU-T X.1277, a mobile authentication standard pertaining to biometrics and other post-password mechanisms. Meanwhile, CTAP, a component of the new FIDO2 standards concerning web authentication with biometrics and security keys, has become Recommendation ITU-T X.1278.

In a statement announcing the certifications, FIDO Alliance Executive Director Brett McDowell explained that they represent “arguably the highest bar in ICT standardization,” adding that the ITU-T’s approval “illustrates the maturity of FIDO authentication technology and complements our web standardization work with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).”

ITU-T Study Group 17 Chairman Heung Youl Youm, meanwhile, highlighted how the certifications can help to further proliferate FIDO’s strong authentication standards. “These new ITU standards will provide a concrete basis for the two FIDO specifications to be adopted across the 193 ITU Member States,” he said.

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