The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the standards body for the Internet, is working on a new WebAuthn project that will bring strong authentication to the Web. The group is collaborating with the Fast Identity Online (FIDO) Alliance, a smaller industry group that was also developing strong authentication. W3C will build on the FIDO2 specifications to create strong authentication standards, including two-factor authentication and biometrics standards, that can be used by all browsers and platforms.
“By partnering with W3C to standardize FIDO Authentication for the entire web platform, the FIDO ecosystem grows by more than just one or two leading web browsers,” Brett McDowell, executive director of the FIDO Alliance, said. “We expect to benefit from the entire community of web browsers and web application servers supporting the standard. W3C is simply where the web community produces their standards, so it was more practical to work on this set of web technologies in that forum.”
