WoSign officially become sponsor-level member of FIDO Alliance

WoSign officially become the sponsor-level member of the international organization, Fast Identity Online (FIDO). This organization is launched by 20 units of Google, Microsoft, Qualcomm, Samsung Electronics, Alibaba, Lenovo, PayPal, RSA, Visa, MasterCard and other. It has 51 sponsor-level members and nearly a hundred associate-level members. It officially issued standard version of FIDO 1.0 on December 9, 2014, which presented members of the alliance could use this to provide related identity authentication products and services.

WoSign is the only globally trusted CA that has joined this alliance. We will make contribution to the standard setting of using global-trust certificate in the field of strong identity authentication.

FIDO Alliance will set open standards that support different strong identity authentication technology, which contain biometric recognition and Trusted Platform Modules, USB Security Tokens, Near Field Communication and One Time Passwords. It will also allow all these different authentication technologies to be mutually comprehensible.

FIDO 1.0 contains two specifications. One is used for Universal Authentication Framework, another one is specified in Universal 2^nd Factor. Universal 2^nd Factor is a token used to do strong identity authentication while Universal Authentication Framework is to use biometric recognition or other methods to complete the strong identity authentication. So the password is no longer needed.

The president of FIDO Alliance, Michael Barrett, said that the birth of FIDO 1.0 represents passwords and PIN of old times will gradually weed out and we will welcome a new era of strong identity authentication without passwords in internet service and electronic commercial.

FIDO 1.0 is applicable to various devices, servers and client software and covers browsers, browser plug-in and different software. Any website or cloud application can be connected to devices that have or will have supported FIDO standards, including biometric recognition authentication device and hardware token.

One of the missions of FIDO is that members do not need to worry about violating other members' patent while using UAF or U2F. All members can sell freely different kinds of FIDO authentication solutions, and non-members can deploy these solutions. Google, Samsung, Alibaba and PayPal have already introduced products applied with FIDO standards. At present, FIDO Alliance has completed the core standard of 1.0 and will soon integrate NFC and Bluetooth certification ability. FIDO will improve this standard under new requirements in the future.