While this year’s Mobile World Congress sucked up a lot of attention with its wide-ranging array of cutting-edge mobile technologies, a recent security-focused event helped to highlight the growing importance of FIDO security standards in the mobile sector and beyond.
Looking back on RSA Conference 2017, FIDO Alliance Senior Director of Marketing Andrew Shikiar highlights three key trends.
First: “Authentication is a C-Suite Issue.” Shikiar suggests that there is a growing recognition among CISOs that they need to ensure they have the basics of enterprise security in place, and that FIDO standards are increasingly among those basics. Second, Shikiar says the FIDO booth at RSA 2017 saw a number of security executives asking how FIDO standards can be applied to the Internet of Things, suggesting that IoT security is of growing concern to the enterprise security community. And FIDO standards do very much apply here, with U2F security offering an important mechanism for making sure that the devices connecting with enterprise assets are in the right hands.
Finally, Shikiar says that ‘leading security practitioners believe in FIDO authentication,’ noting that members of FIDO’s implementer panel at RSA 2017, including representatives from Google, USAA, Aetna, and RSA itself, all attested to the importance of FIDO standards, with Google’s Christiaan Brand going so far as to say that “FIDO affords the highest level of protection against phishing and forms the basis for all authentication at Google.” With such high-profile support – Facebook has also now enabled FIDO 2FA support – it’s no wonder that FIDO standards are catching on in a big way.
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March 3, 2017 – by Alex Perala
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