Apple has joined the FIDO Alliance, an organization that aims to help reduce the use of passwords by providing free and open authentication standards.
Nok Nok Labs, inventor of the FIDO specifications and a founding member of the FIDO Alliance, announced on Wednesday that Apple has not only become a member, but that it has also taken a leadership role as a board member.
Amazon, Arm, Facebook, Google, Intel, Microsoft, Mastercard, PayPal, Qualcomm, Samsung Visa and VMware are also members of the FIDO Alliance.
Passwords are the root cause of many breaches and managing them can be problematic, especially for enterprises. The FIDO Alliance hopes to address the problems associated with passwords by providing a set of standards for simple yet strong authentication.
The specifications promoted by the organization are FIDO Universal Second Factor (FIDO U2F), FIDO Universal Authentication Framework (FIDO UAF), and FIDO2, which is comprised of W3C Web Authentication (WebAuthn) and Client-to-Authenticator Protocols (CTAP).
Products that support these methods can allow their users to authenticate using biometrics (e.g. fingerprint scanner, iris scanner, and facial recognition) or a wearable authenticator (e.g. security keys, wearables, mobile phones).
Some Apple devices are equipped with the Touch ID fingerprint recognition feature and the Face ID facial recognition system. The tech giant has also added support for FIDO2-based security keys to its macOS and iOS operating systems.
Related: Ready or Not, Here Comes FIDO: How to Prepare for Success
Related: New Authentication Standard Coming to Major Web Browsers
Related: Support for FIDO2 Passwordless Authentication Added to Android
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