Cisco report: 81 percent of all smartphones have biometrics enabled

The percentage of phones with built-in biometrics capabilities remained at around 81 percent over the last year, according to Cisco Duo’s 2022 Trusted Access Report. The adoption rates for biometrics was similar to 2021 findings following significant growth for several consecutive years.

The new data, gathered via the company’s Duo identity and device health solutions, also suggests a 50 percent increase in accounts allowing WebAuthn authentication since April 2019.

Further, the number of transactions with multi-factor authentication (MFA) using Duo rose by 38 percent in the past year.

“We’re also seeing an increasingly global adoption of MFA authentications from Ireland, Japan, India, Canada, and the Philippines,” Cisco writes. “This demonstrates that a wider base of countries is rising to the challenge, defending their systems against the threats of today.”

Percent increase in MFA among countries with the highest number of integrations. Credit: Cisco Duo.

Other data in the report indicates that failures due to out-of-date devices increased 51.8 percent between 2021 and 2022. Less than 1 percent of organizations have implemented explicit geographic-based deny or allow policies.

Cisco says the report is based on data from 13 billion authentications from almost 50 million different devices across customers in North and Latin America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia Pacific.

The Cisco Partner Summit conference

Cisco also held its annual conference in Las Vegas this week, unveiling a series of new capabilities across its security portfolio.

These include several upgrades to the Cisco Security Cloud platform, designed to protect users, devices and applications across public clouds and private data centers without cloud lock-in.

Further, Cisco announced the availability of Duo Passwordless Authentication for all customers to protect single-sign-on (SSO) applications and enabling users to log in without passwords using native biometrics like Windows Hello and Apple’s Touch ID, and security keys. The Duo Mobile app can also provide passwordless authentication.

The company says the new options will simplify implementation and reduce the total cost of ownership for customers, and encourage further biometrics adoption.

The new passwordless features are being released soon after a market report from KuppingerCole forecast the passwordless authentication market to reach $6.6 billion by 2025.

Article Topics

biometric authentication  |  biometrics  |  Cisco  |  Duo Security  |  market report  |  multifactor authentication  |  smartphones