What is FIDO Webauthn?

 

Most websites, services, as well as applications have difficulty providing secure, convenient authentication for users, and passwords are usually the problem. While the passwords work in most cases, they tend to be either so simple that they are easily guessed by hackers. The passwords can also be so complex that they are hard for users to remember.

All passwords, regardless of their complexity, are vulnerable to phishing and data breaches. The good news is that FIDO WebAuthn, which is a new web authentication standard approved in March 2019 by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), has made it easy for websites, services as well as applications to offer strong authentication without relying on passwords.

Replacing passwords with strong authentication based on public key cryptography, in which the private key never leaves the user’s device, makes authentication both easier to use and more secure, something that benefits users and service providers alike. The FIDO WebAuthn standard is already supported by all major browsers and most platforms including, Windows 10, Google Chrome, Android, Mozilla Firefox, Android, Microsoft Edge, Apple iOS and Apple Safari.

FIDO WebAuthn supports various models for account authentication, leveraging both external roaming authenticators, like hardware security keys, and authenticators that are built into computing and mobile devices, like facial recognition technology and fingerprint readers. Applications and web services can choose to implement FIDO WebAuthn for passwordless authentication, two-factor authentication and multi-factor authentication (MFA).

The FIDO WebAuthn standard also supports step-up authentication, such as when a website, service, or application asks users for an additional factor before performing a high risk or high-value transaction. It makes use of key terms such as relying party, a client/platform, and an authenticator. A relying party is a   is a website, service, or application that wants to authenticate users, a client/platform is the underlying platform upon which the application is running, such as a browser or operating system, and an authenticator is the device that accepts the user’s input to authenticate the user’s credential for the relying party.

For more information on FIDO WebAuthn, visit our website at https://loginid.io/

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