Yubico Founder Celebrates W3C’s WebAuthn Approval

“From start to finish, the WebAuthn spec development has been more than a three-year process, but for Yubico, this is a culmination of more than a decade of innovation and seven years of standards work.” –
Stina Ehrensvärd, Founder & CEO, Yubico

The WebAuthn specification became an official W3C standard this week, and Yubico founder and CEO Stina Ehrensvärd is celebrating by giving her company a hard-earned pat on the back.

As Ehrensvärd notes in a new post on the Yubico website, Yubico was one of nine Specification Editors that worked on the authentication specification, and was one of the two co-chairs of the W3C WebAuthn. Yubico also had six working group members, with one engineer commented to Ehrensvärd that working on WebAuthn was “one of the most interesting and scary projects” he had ever had, due to the weight of responsibility he felt for developing a security standard that would potentially impact billions of people.

Yubico’s involvement in the WebAuthn standardization work stems from the company’s specialization in developing and selling U2F and FIDO2 security keys. These solutions can be plugged into USB ports, or in some cases wirelessly paired with devices, to enable end users to confirm that they are physically present at the device through which they’re trying to authenticate; WebAuthn is designed to enable their use for online authentication through major web browsers, as well as to support biometric authentication on the web.

“From start to finish, the WebAuthn spec development has been more than a three-year process, but for Yubico, this is a culmination of more than a decade of innovation and seven years of standards work,” Ehrensvärd writes, adding later, “We contributed to this standard to help as many people as possible stay safe online.”

Source: Yubico Blog