MFA prominent among winners of FIDO Alliance 2021 Developer Challenge

The FIDO Alliance has announced the winners of its 2021 Developer Challenge for on-device digital ID authentication at its Authenticate 2021 event in Seattle. And at Identiverse 2021, a Nok Nok partner shares details on the gains it has made with passwordless authentication.

The gold winner of the challenge was Canadian company Lockdrop, which uses WebAuthn for multi-factor authentication (MFA) to strengthen its document transfer service.

Lockdrop’s solution has been developed to enable the exchange of large datasets easily and securely.

Tokyo-based Shaxware was the silver winner of the FIDO 2021 Developer Challenge. The firm developed a proof of concept technology integrating the Japanese National digital ID Card (My Number Card) into a FIDO roaming authenticator.

Shaxware also proposed to extend WebAuthn by using the external IC card as a primary digital certificate in the future.

Finally, SoundAuth (also known as Trillbit) was the bronze winner of the FIDO challenge.

Based in Boston with R&D staff stationed in India, SoundAuth built an MFA solution that uses data over sound technology to provide a user experience free from reliance on additional hardware tokens or internet connectivity.

“We were very pleased to have built off of our prior developer hackathon efforts in Korea, to have brought the challenge global, and to have added a focus on public APIs,” says Joon Hyuk Lee, APAC Market Development director of the FIDO Alliance.

“The Challenge demonstrated that the combination of open technology coupled with the entrepreneurial vision of a developer will result in inspiring outcomes and innovation. We look forward to expanding this effort in 2022,” he concluded.

Nok Nok and Intuit reflect on two years of FIDO collaboration

The partnership between the companies started in 2019, when Intuit, an accounting software company utilizing Nok Nok Labs biometric technologies, first implemented FIDO authentication.

Over the course of the past 24 months, Nok Nok connected its FIDO-certified technologies to a number of Intuit platforms, including TurboTax, QuickBooks, QuickBooks Self Employed, and Mint. The integration enables password-free authentication and onboarding.

Nok Nok says that since adopting FIDO standards, Intuit reports an 80 percent increase in registrations in their mobile app, as well as a 10 percent improvement in sign-up conversion, and a 50 percent decrease in onboarding time.

The new data comes weeks after Nok Nok partnered with CompoSecure on a new, FIDO-certified digital ID card.

Article Topics

Authenticate Conference  |  authentication  |  biometrics  |  digital identity  |  FIDO Alliance  |  multifactor authentication  |  Nok Nok Labs  |  research and development  |  standards