Apple, Google, and Microsoft today announced plans to expand support for a common passwordless sign-in standard created by the FIDO Alliance and the World Wide Web Consortium.
Whereas previous implementations of passwordless verification required users to sign in to each website or app with each device before they can use passwordless functionality, now users will be able to use two additional capabilities over the course of the coming year on all of the companies’ platforms:
- The ability to access their FIDO sign-in credentials on different devices without having to re-enroll every account.
- The ability to use FIDO authentication on mobile devices to sign in to an app or website on a nearby device, no matter which OS platform or browser is in use.
“The complete shift to a passwordless world will begin with consumers making it a natural part of their lives. Any viable solution must be safer, easier, and faster than the passwords and legacy multi-factor authentication methods used today,” said Alex Simons, corporate vice president for Identity Program Management at Microsoft. “By working together as a community across platforms, we can at last achieve this vision and make significant progress toward eliminating passwords. We see a bright future for FIDO-based credentials in both consumer and enterprise scenarios and will continue to build support across Microsoft apps and services.”
The addition of the two capabilities will provide a better user experience and broad support of the standards-based will enable service providers to offer FIDO credentials without needing passwords as an alternative sign-in or account recovery method.
Additional details are available here.
