FIDO | Beyond the Basics | What You Need to Know

April 14, 2017 Nok Nok News 0 comments

But now we need to set our sights beyond basic FIDO. Standards typically represent the lowest common denominator of functionality that can be agreed to across a large body of independent organizations. Certainly, more advance features that leverage FIDO are possible, and most definitely desirable.

While our product and engineering teams lead FIDO standards development, we have been busy also mapping out and delivering capabilities that go beyond basic FIDO. The following questions should be considered as your organization establishes or evolves their approach to modern authentication.

How important are risk signals and policy based authentication mechanisms?

The ability to measure certain risk oriented signals, and build policies around those signals leads to a more granular view of authentication. Three areas that we have focused on include geolocation, travel speed and device health:

Geolocation – This signal locates a user’s device location and can check against a policy defined list of restricted countries. This enables the administrator to deny access from disallowed locations and adjust their risk score.
Travel Speed – This signal determines if the user’s device has travelled too far in too short a time. It uses the device’s geolocation to calculate the travel speed from the last login location and time. With this information, users can take policy-defined action to adjust risk scores or deny fraudulent access from multiple locations within a short time interval.
Device Health – This signal checks for signs of tampering on the device.

Do you need to consider Out-of-band authentication and friendly-fraud scenarios?

Out-of-band authentication extends the FIDO credentials on a user’s mobile device to a second device – primarily their desktop. The omni-channel approach can bring a new desktop login modality to customers. Start a banking transaction on your phone, and finish it on your computer while leveraging the biometrics from your phone to validate the user on both devices.

Reduction of “Friendly Fraud” – In order to counter unintended fraud on shared devices, we’ve developed a method of ensuring that only biometrics authorized by the primary device or application user can authenticate to an account. This offers a major differentiator over basic FIDO for use cases that need a higher standard of security.

Do you have plans to support multiple Relying Parties in a multi-tenant capability?

For mobile network operators and other internet infrastructure vendors, the opportunity arises to become the consumer identity provider of record for many different service providers (Relying Parties) that leverage your platform and ecosystem. Does your business model postulate supporting multiple relying parties and their authentication needs in a multi-tenant capability? If so, a basic FIDO implementation will single tenant support will require a far broader investment in infrastructure and licensing than Nok Nok’s leading multi-tenant solutions in this space. Understanding the nuances of different vendor platforms and capabilities can create strategic advantage now and with future business needs.

Our development team has even more interesting new functionality in the lab that they will be sharing in upcoming release cycles. Stay tuned for additional features that extend the benefits of a FIDO approach to more use cases and value drivers.

16 Dec

3 Min read

Bipartisan U.S. Commission on Enhancing Cybersecurity & FIDO for Strong Authentication

December 16, 2016 Nok Nok News 0 comments

Recently the U.S. Commission on Enhancing National Cybersecurity released its report detailing some 50 separate recommendations on how the next administration can strengthen cybersecurity across the United States.

At the core of these recommendations were two key items that have been at the heart of what Nok Nok Labs has been doing since its inception. First, the Commission calls on the new Administration to “launch a national public and private initiative to achieve major security and privacy improvements by increasing the use of strong authentication to improve identity management”. In an interview with Charlie Rose after this report was released, the Vice-Chair of the Commission, Samuel Palmisano, ex-CEO of IBM, identifies the fact that the Federal Government can play a massive role in changing how people view their method of authentication. By implementing strong authentication principles across the various government services, within various government agencies, the massive Federal Government has an opportunity to be an engine that will drive change in consumers expectations and behavior.

Additionally, the FIDO Alliance and the FIDO protocol were called out by name as an example of how to overcome identity authentication challenges. FIDO can be used on over a billion devices that are in the hands of users today, right now. Microsoft has incorporated FIDO into their Windows Hello feature and there are millions of people worldwide who are using it to authorize payments, log into accounts, check their private healthcare information and even gain access to buildings and meeting rooms.

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What sets FIDO apart is usability.

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What sets FIDO apart is usability. By giving the users the option to secure their devices using biometrics, FIDO eliminates the need to keep track of several different credentials and makes strong authentication possible at large scale.

Of course, security is a game of details. The FIDO specification is only a protocol and not a deployable technology. It needs to be built. Here at Nok Nok Labs, we have had the pleasure of working with leading organizations to develop and license our technology to secure the entirety of the required architecture — from the trusted execution environment at the silicon layer, to the ecosystem of authenticators capable of plugging into the network, to the operating systems on devices and the servers on the back end.

This expertise can be leveraged by our clients and partners to create a flexible, extensible platform capable of providing a seamless experience to their users and proof against the disruptive innovations coming in the world of biometrics.

While there will be uncertainty with the next Administration, Nok Nok Labs will continue to work to achieve our long-held goals to have FIDO be ubiquitous on devices, in applications, in authenticators, contained within browsers and operating systems and embedded in silicon. No single vendor can move this mountain on their own. We applaud the Commission in its recommendations and look forward to continuing the journey we started several years ago.

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