Apple, Google, and Microsoft have announced that they will be expanding support for a common password-less standard developed by the FIDO Alliance and the World Wide Web Consortium. These three tech giants plan to incorporate password-less sign-in to more of their products over the coming year which could lead to an improvement in the security of online accounts.
Commenting on the news, Alex Simons, Corporate Vice President, Identity Program Management at Microsoft, said:
“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. 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.”
While web browsers have gotten very good in recent years at generating secure passwords and helping you keep them in sync across your devices, too many people still prefer the option of reusing existing passwords and just hoping that none of their accounts are compromised. If the password is compromised on one website, a hacker just needs to reuse it on another service the victim uses to gain entry to that account too.
With today’s announcement, the companies will commit to allowing users to automatically access their FIDO sign-in credentials on their devices without having to re-enroll every account, and those who use FIDO authentication to sign in on apps or websites will be able to login using a nearby mobile device, regardless of operating system or browser. These measures should give access to secure sign-on to more people.