Montreal-based legacy protection platform PasswordBox has made it clear that it wants to help get rid of passwords. Yes, you heard that right.
It does actually make sense that the company that created a one-tap login for all of a users passwords across the Internet (to make their life a lot simpler), is actually headed down a path that would completely render the password useless. We’re a few years before that actually happens, but from the sounds of it, PasswordBox CEO Dan Robichaud foresaw all of this when he first started creating the company. A day when personal identity will be confirmed through biometrics, such as fingerprint and iris scanners, voice and facial recognition and other techniques.
It looks like the company is taking one step closer to that today as it announced it has joined the FIDO Alliance, which is a boring acronym meant to signify a non-profit industry consortium launched last year by a number of companies including PayPal and Lenovo. It’s meant to address the lack of interoperability among strong authentication devices and the problems users face creating and remembering multiple usernames and passwords.
“In the coming months, consumers will be stuck in a position where their devices, online accounts, and digital identities all rely on different methods of authentication such as biometrics, two-factor authentication, and passwords.” said Robichaud. “This is a complicated problem and where we see PasswordBox bringing the most value to the FIDO Alliance. By using our advanced machine learning technology and federated identity management solution we will be able to help people simply authenticate themselves across all platforms – no matter how quickly vendors and web providers commit to the new FIDO Standard.”
The members of FIDO are committed to sharing and collaborating over technology to deliver open specifications for universal strong authentication that enables FIDO-compliant authentication methods to be interoperable, more secure and private, and easier to use. PasswordBox will work with the FIDO Alliance to create simpler, stronger authentication solutions and reduce online fraud and safeguard personal data, transactions and identities.
The FIDO Alliance Board of Directors includes the Bank of America Corporation; BlackBerry; CrucialTec; Discover Financial Services; Google; IdentityX; Lenovo; MasterCard; Microsoft; Nok Nok Labs, Inc.; and more.