This new logo is all about better logins, so keep your eye peeled
FIDO Alliance promotes a new step toward strengthening and eventually ditching passwords.
- Shankland covered the tech industry for more than 25 years and was a science writer for five years before that. He has deep expertise in microprocessors, digital photography, computer hardware and software, internet standards, web technology, and more.
Expect to see this FIDO Alliance logo on websites that adopted the authentication standard for better security.
The FIDO Alliance, whose technology to strengthen login security and eventually replace passwords altogether, has won support from tech companies like Google, MIcrosoft and Apple. And now it's trying to win you over, too.
On Wednesday, it launched a website called Login with FIDO to try to explain how FIDO authentication works. It also revealed a FIDO logo it hopes websites and apps will display in an effort to reassure people their sign-on process is modern and secure. It's like logos you see for Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and USB that can give you some assurance the technology works even if you don't understand all the details.
FIDO standardizes how biometrics and hardware security keys can be used to augment passwords or entirely replace them, and it's an option for logging on to sites like Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Twitter.
The alliance's effort is designed to explain to regular folks how the technology works and to convince IT administrators and website developers to embrace it, said FIDO Executive Director Andrew Shikiar. But the alliance has been working on its technology for seven years, so you shouldn't expect passwords to be phased out anytime soon.
"It'll take time for behavioral change and education to take root," Shikiar said.
If the alliance can convince more services to offer FIDO login and more people to use it, that could help free us from our password nightmare. We often use the same password on many sites, which means hackers who filch your login credentials from one data breach can gain access to multiple sites.
FIDO is good for the two-factor authentication that means a hacked password isn't so useful. And for sites that use FIDO authentication with no passwords at all, there's nothing for hackers to steal in the first place.
