Apple Joins FIDO Alliance, Commits to Eliminate Passwords

Apple has signed up as a board member of the FIDO Alliance, an organisation committed to eliminating the need for passwords.

Besides Apple, most technology giants including Amazon, Facebook, Google are board members of the alliance which wants password-only logins to be replaced with secure and fast login experiences across websites and apps using the emerging standard WebAuthn, ZDNet reported on Wednesday.

In 2019, WebAuthn became an official W3C web standard. Browser support for the newest set of FIDO specifications was also introduced for Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, and Opera.

The FIDO (Fast Identity Online) Alliance was formed in July 2012 to address the lack of interoperability among strong authentication technologies, and remedy the problems users face with creating and remembering multiple usernames and passwords.

It aims to change the nature of authentication with standards for simpler, stronger authentication that define an open, scalable, interoperable set of mechanisms that reduce reliance on passwords.

"We know that realising the FIDO Alliance's mission to move the world beyond the password 'shared secret' model of authentication requires making FIDO a ubiquitous feature across all of the devices, operating systems and browsers we use every day. Given the platform enablement progress of this year, we are well on our way to that ubiquity," Andrew Shikiar, Executive Director and Chief Marketing Officer of the FIDO Alliance while presenting the organisations 2019 progress report in December.

"Never before have service providers and developers had the ability to enable convenient, cryptographically secure authentication to a user base this broad. Service providers are now taking advantage of these new capabilities on a global scale," Shikiar said.