On Monday, May 20th, the FIDO Alliance※ Osaka Seminar was held.
※ A global non-profit organization promoting authentication standards that reduce reliance on passwords. We are also an active Alliance member in Japan. This time, the seminar was held at the Hilton Hotel in Osaka. And since our development team is based in Kobe, we all decided to attend as the seminar was being held nearby.
This time, there were many participants from overseas, as the FIDO Plenary is being held from May 21st to 23rd. It seemed like the majority of the participants were English speakers.
(As an aside, since all the receptionists were foreigners, they didn't understand Japanese, so at the request of the Alliance, our staff helped out at the reception desk before the seminar started. A little contribution to the Alliance?)
At the seminar, some people spoke in English and others in Japanese. But simultaneous interpretation earphones were provided, which was a relief for non-English staff, as he is not very good at English.)
The seminar included an explanation of FIDO (Passkey) by a global key figure from the FIDO Alliance, a talk on its prospects, and several speakers from well-known companies.
The seminar explaining FIDO (Passkey) was of course excellent, but I was personally more interested in the content of the seminars given by the company representatives, so I will write a little about that today.
Each company mainly introduced cases where they introduced passkeys for authentication of their services.
In addition to analyzing why they introduced Passkey and what its benefits are. The content included stories of their experiences, such as the difficulties they faced during implementation, requests for FIDO, and concrete figures on the number of implementations and effects. They shared valuable stories that we don't usually get to hear.
How to get end users to switch from existing authentication to passkey is a difficult problem, and it was very interesting to hear the ideas of each company. I listened to the solutions to this issue, thinking that they could be useful for our development.
What was eye-opening for me when listening to the case studies of each company was that the advantages of passkey were not only the improved security but also the emphasis on UX, such as improved authentication speed and success rate.
Our company provides many BtoB services, and when explaining the benefits, we stand to focus on security strength, so I learned that we lack the perspective of BtoC.
What particularly impressed me was that each company has introduced Passkey, and while they have some requests for improvements to FIDO specifications, they are convinced that FIDO is a great thing. Everyone, including the audience, also was encouraged to spread FIDO throughout Japan.
In recent years, Passkey has been introduced one after another in the services of large companies, including the companies that were presenting this time, and I feel that awareness of Passkey is gradually increasing among general users. We at FIDO are convinced that FIDO technology is excellent, and as a member of the FIDO Alliance, we would like to work to further spread the benefits of FIDO.
The materials used in this seminar will be made public at a later date, so I would like to review the contents again once they are released.
It was a very meaningful seminar.
We also offer services that use passkeys, such as YubiOn FIDO Logon and YubiOn FIDO2 Server, so please take a look if you are interested.