It’s been just 287 days since the FIDO Alliance published its first Proposed Standards for universal strong authentication to the world. That’s the short distance between a finished protocol and several marquee deployments of these new technologies from major companies around the world including most recently Bank of America, Dropbox, NTT DOCOMO, Google and today GitHub.
If you thought FIDO standards were only for FIDO Alliance member companies, think again. Specifically, Dropbox and GitHub are not FIDO Alliance members, and NTT DOCOMO was not a FIDO Alliance member when it first deployed. These are all examples of companies, from the outside looking in, recognize the long-term viability of FIDO protocols for strong authentication at scale. This nuance speaks volumes to the recognized maturity of these specifications less than a year from publication.
The FIDO Alliance and FIDO ecosystem have experienced a meteoric rise fueled by a 200+ member consortium and a laundry list of over 60 FIDO Certified products.
Now is the point where the story has moved on from standards development to market adoption, which ultimately makes mobile and web applications simpler and safer for end-users.
With that in mind, we introduce our FIDO Alliance blog as a place where we can continue to showcase these developments, detail FIDO’s continuing work such as certifications, and discuss progress toward a future where interoperable, easy-to-use public key cryptography will be the norm for online strong authentication.
What lies ahead are new products, further deployments, additional innovative members, formal standardizations and work toward support across many platforms. Along the way, there are conference presentations, seminars and webinars to highlight in this blog, along with countless questions to answer. There are technical matters to explore and ultimately, the realization of a simpler, stronger authentication layer for the Internet.
All of these topics will find their way into this space.
The technology is always just the first step; it’s the cultural shift where the FIDO Alliance must shine in leading the world to simpler, stronger, universal authentication that as delightful to use as it is secure and respectful of end-user privacy.
With this blog, we’ll keep an eye on the critical developments within industry and government, along with the consumer market, where billions of people have fallen victim to breaches in the past several months.
As the Executive Director of the Alliance, I look forward to interacting with more authentication stakeholders and end users through this new communication vehicle, the FIDO blog. So please feel free to leave comments here and/or post to our Twitter account @FIDOalliance, and we will get back to you.
Written by: Brett McDowell
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