Apple joins FIDO Alliance to eliminate passwords

Apple has joined the FIDO Alliance.

This is a very big deal because 81% of all hacking-based security breaches can be traced back to weak passwords. The mission of the FIDO Alliance is to use free and open standards via FIDO Authentication that enables password-only logins to be replaced with secure and fast login experiences across websites and apps using WebAuth. The efforts of the FIDO Alliance have been supported by pretty much every major technology company with one big exception: Apple. Not anymore!

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols for ZDNet:

“Passwords are like the cockroaches of the internet and companies have been trying to kill them off for years,” said Merritt Maxim, Forrester Research principal security analyst in a CNBC interview. WebAuth, is a specification written by the W3C and FIDO. Its application programming interface (API) allows servers to register and authenticate users using public key cryptography instead of a password.

Rolf Lindemann, co-chair of FIDO’s Security Requirements Working Group… believes that now that Apple is getting a first-hand look into where FIDO is heading, it can help direct it. This will “result in support for passwordless authentication that best fits the Apple ecosystem.”

MacDailyNews Take: Die, passwords, die!. Anyone who supports older parents, in-laws, etc. knows the pain of passwords implicitly.