That’s interesting.

That’s exactly it. It should be hard to execute an attack, and it’s too easy right now. You can license at a professionally serviced phishing kit, and then spin up a phishing site in no time.

We’re seeing that not every country is as aggressive as Taiwan. Korea’s been pretty systemic with FIDO support, but more and more we’re seeing governments either reference FIDO or leverage it for consumer services, identity schemes, employee protection, things like that.

It’s amazing. I hear it and read about it, but actually hearing people talk about it, and seeing the presentation, it is everywhere, which is remarkable.

Government adoption. I thought your talk really set the stage for the seminar so well. I came away so impressed by exactly how ingrained FIDO is in Taiwan.

We’ve seen good adoption. What’s interesting, we had adoption from day one, with a lot of big brands using FIDO, the mobile native apps, security keys, but now with passkey we have the opportunity to take it to the next level. We’ll talk about why.

One unique thing about FIDO is the standards efforts is there’s no competitive body. If you want to use standards based authentication, you come to FIDO because literally every company that you want to have working on this is working on it together, inside of FIDO Alliance.

When Apple joined FIDO at the beginning of 2020, that sent a very powerful message to the world, that this is really the only body working on this, and if you want to use standards based strong authentication, you look to FIDO Alliance.

What’s unique here is, what people don’t understand is the importance of the authenticator mediating this relationship. The local user verification; everything’s local of course. A bit about who we are. I think this is important to talk about. The main reason is to understand what’s happening within FIDO Alliance.

You know how this works. I don’t need to explain public key cryptography to you.

Yes, or having the token keychain problem, or PKI, asking consumers to do this was too much. Consumers will opt out, and employees will just work around it. It’s user friendly public key cryptography.

There’s a graveyard of old strong authentication technologies that were too hard to use.

What’s interesting about this, and we’ll talk about it throughout the slides, is that our tagline is “Simpler, stronger authentication.” The conversations we used to have were always about the “stronger” piece. It was always the security posture, but more and more the conversations really begin and end with usability.

Yes. Largely, yes. I think passkey…exactly. That’s the contrast. Password is something you know, passkey is something you have. That’s what we’ve been doing all along. Everyone has a chart, looking at the top right corner, always, but it’s been a focus. Simpler and stronger than both passwords and SMS ...

This comparison, compare and contrast, is something that we message on and try to get across to industry and government, often.

What we want to do is move towards modern authentication, and FIDO authentication, which inherently is an efficient system, does not involve sending a human readable shared secret over the network, so it’s easier initiated, cryptographically secure.

SMS OTP, more and more you read about bypass attacks. We have major concerns about consumers not understanding the threats they’re in, but more importantly service providers doing what I’ll call “Check the box” 2FA, your SMS OTP. It’s not good enough.

We need a better way, we know that, so this is what we’ve been talking about for some time. I think this is very important. The way we’ve always done things is what we call legacy authentication, knowledge based authentication, and even 2FA.

These types of numbers, fraud numbers, account takeovers, fraud costs, these are the things that I’ve always driven FIDO Alliance to try to solve the password problem. The fact of the matter is, the vast majority of these issues track directly back to dependence on knowledge based credentials — passwords ...

I know you know a lot about FIDO already, but I thought it was a good chance to level set on what we’re talking about these days with FIDO Alliance, and what we see driving the market, and talk a little bit about what we our priorities are at the ...

That’s very interesting.

You did?

You want me to go through the slides? OK.

Karen?

Yeah.

Yes, we’ve been working to have the Plenary Taipei for three to four years now. We had a very nice stay here, we had a very productive set of meetings. We appreciated the video that you did for the seminar on Monday.

Yes.