Changing the Nature of Authentication

The FIDO Alliance is an open industry association with a focused mission: authentication standards to help reduce the world’s over-reliance on passwords.

Passwords endure despite the growing consensus their use needs to be reduced, if not replaced. But even though effective PKI and strong authentication solutions have existed for years, barriers to widespread adoption persist. Consumers don’t like the user experience, and online service providers don’t want the cost and complexity of developing and provisioning their own dedicated solutions.

The FIDO Alliance is working to change the nature of authentication with open standards that are more secure than passwords and SMS OTPs, simpler for consumers to use, and easier for service providers to deploy and manage.

The FIDO Alliance works to fulfill its mission by:

• Developing technical specifications that define an open, scalable, interoperable set of mechanisms that reduce the reliance on passwords to authenticate users
• Operating industry certification programs to help ensure successful worldwide adoption of the specifications
• Submitting mature technical specification(s) to recognized standards development organization(s) for formal standardization

Specification Development

The FIDO Alliance currently has published three sets of specifications for simpler, stronger authentication: 

1. FIDO Universal Second Factor (FIDO U2F)
2. FIDO Universal Authentication Framework (FIDO UAF)
3. FIDO2, which includes the W3C’s Web Authentication (WebAuthn) specification and FIDO Client to Authenticator Protocol (CTAP). 

The specifications are open and free for global use.

How does FIDO Work?