“It is with pride that the FIDO Alliance releases the review draft specifications to the public today, before our first anniversary of starting the long overdue revolution in authentication. Congratulations to our members for their insights, expertise, and tireless dedication to delivering better authentication that is more secure, private and easier-to-use than prevailing password schemas,” said FIDO Alliance president, Michael Barrett. “With today’s public release of the review draft specifications, we especially welcome and anticipate new types of members coming from various enterprises. Furthermore, we encourage Relying Parties to begin testing their unique FIDO authentication needs with the commercial solutions already available from many FIDO member companies.”
The FIDO Alliance also announces that its membership is approaching 100 strong, with Aetna, ARM, Dell, Discretix, IdentityX, Netflix, Next Biometrics, Österreichische Staatsdruckerei GmbH, Salesforce, SafeNet, Sonavation, STMicroelectronics, and Wave Systems being among the most recent companies to join as Sponsor members of the Alliance. Launched in February 2013 with six founding members, the alliance has grown rapidly with representation from every continent and every industry.
“When I first started discussing the need for a strong authentication protocol with Michael Barrett, Taher Elgamal and others many years ago, we knew we had something big on our hands,” said Ramesh Kesanupalli, founder of Nok Nok Labs and FIDO visionary, “and the progress we’ve seen in a single year in attracting membership and delivering draft specifications signifies the need for a drastic change in the marketplace and a collective determination to accomplish it. As a founding member, Nok Nok Labs is proud to be delivering FIDO Ready solutions based on these new specifications.”
FIDO standards address industry and consumer pain points by ensuring that users and online service providers have a variety of choices to select from when adopting simpler, stronger authentication alternatives to today’s prevailing reliance on single-factor passwords.
The FIDO specifications emphasize a device-centric model that reflects the Alliance’s thoughtful dedication to usability, privacy and security. FIDO specifications will support a full range of authentication technologies, including biometrics such as fingerprint and iris scanners, voice and facial recognition, as well as further enable existing solutions and communications standards, such as Trusted Platform Modules (TPM), USB Security Tokens, embedded Secure Elements (eSE), Smart Cards, Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), and Near Field Communication (NFC). The open specifications are being designed to be extensible and to accommodate future innovation, as well as protect existing investments. FIDO specifications allow device-specific authentication capabilities to be leveraged by online services within an interoperable infrastructure, enabling authentication choice to meet the distinct needs of users and organizations. The FIDO specifications complement and add value to identity federation. The improved user authentication enabled by FIDO specifications can be federated using existing industry standards such as OpenID and SAML. Committed to core privacy principles, the FIDO Alliance published a reference whitepaper. The FIDO Alliance will continue to develop and mature the specifications with additional features and refinements based on interoperability testing and real-world deployment experience.
FIDO specifications allow device-specific authentication capabilities to be leveraged by online services within an interoperable infrastructure, enabling authentication choice to meet the distinct needs of users and organizations. The FIDO Alliance will continue to develop and mature the specifications with additional features and refinements based on interoperability testing and real world deployment experience.
FIDO Alliance members are already developing FIDO Ready™ products and services based on early draft FIDO specifications. In October 2013, The FIDO Alliance began a certification program with FIDO Ready™ branding for implementations passing conformance and interoperability testing to early draft specifications. The FIDO Alliance invites all interested organizations to join and contribute their use cases and expertise to these open industry standards that will enable the next generation of authentication to online and cloud services.
