Flexible Authentication Strategy Key to Meeting Business Demands

We are six months out from the rumored launch of a rumored new iPhone. As a result, of course, article after article has been posted confirming that, yes, we love our Apple rumors.

Joking aside, these rumors do contain an interesting development for the iPhone. If true, the iPhone 8 will do away with the home button and introduce a new method of unlocking your device – unlock by facial recognition.

We have long been a proponent of biometric authentication. However, the introduction of a new form of authentication on what is arguably the most popular platform in use today creates a long list of headaches for business who plan on being compatible with and thriving on the new iPhone. Fortunately, Nok Nok Labs has a solution in the market today that can help business with precisely these sorts of headaches.

The problem isn’t the introduction of new, novel technology. The problem isn’t changing behaviors and customers’ patterns. The problem that creates headaches for businesses is that they are deployed on a technological stack of systems that is not designed to seamlessly integrate these new, novel pieces of technology, behaviors and customer patterns. In 2015, Apple introduced the iPhone 5S and kicked off a wave of adoption for everyday consumers with fingerprint sensors. Businesses had to rush to find a way to integrate their mobile applications with Apple’s fingerprint APIs. Even now, two years later, we are still pleasantly surprised when we find a new application has fingerprint-integration rather than kludgy password-based authentication. If the iPhone 8 does rely on facial recognition rather than fingerprints, a whole new wave of work will be required to integrate with that feature. Even those who had already integrated with the fingerprint will have to recode, redesign, retest and rework their existing systems to adapt to a changing landscape.

If only there was a better way.

Fortunately, there is.

The solution is to do away with one-off integrations and embrace a flexible framework for authentication. The FIDO Alliance has published a protocol for accomplishing just that. And this protocol has been vetted and embraced by over 250 companies around the globe including heavyweights such as Google, Microsoft, MasterCard and RSA. Nok Nok Labs built the first implementation of this protocol and offers its customers a way to instantiate an authentication system that can flexibly accept identities from fingerprint sensors, facial or voice recognition applications, even secure PINs or third-party dongles and tokens like the YubiKey. The business will perform a single integration of a server, add just a handful of lines of code to their mobile application, and simply chose the types of authenticators that they wish to accept. As new technology becomes available and is adopted by their customers, the business needs only to change a policy in their configuration to accept it or not.

Feel free to visit our resources page to explore in more detail what our technology is capable of. Also, you can reach out to us directly at [email protected] if you have questions or would like to have a more robust discussion about how we might be able to help your authentication strategy.