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/
Comments
Post a Comment