Apple, Google and Microsoft team up on passwordless logins

Apple, Microsoft, and Google have recently revealed a collaborative effort to adopt a cross platform compatibility for logging into sites and services without the need to enter a unique password everywhere.

With the help of this move, the companies revealed that they would begin supporting industry standards for the passwordless logins set by industry body, World Wide Web Consortium(W3C) and Fast Identity Online (FIDO) alliance to accelerate the adoption of passwordless logins.

Andrew Shikiar, executive director and CMO of the FIDO Alliance, said, "Simpler, stronger authentication is not just FIDO Alliance’s tagline — it also has been a guiding principle for our specifications and deployment guidelines. Ubiquity and usability are critical to seeing multi-factor authentication adopted at scale, and we applaud Apple, Google, and Microsoft for helping make this objective reality by committing to support this user-friendly innovation in their platforms and products. This new capability stands to usher in a new wave of low-friction FIDO implementations alongside the ongoing and growing utilization of security keys — giving service providers a full range of options for deploying modern, phishing-resistant authentication."

Jen Easterly, Director of the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, said, "The standards developed by the FIDO Alliance and World Wide Web Consortium and being led in practice by these innovative companies is the type of forward-leaning thinking that will ultimately keep the American people safer online. I applaud the commitment of our private sector partners to open standards that add flexibility for the service providers and a better user experience for customers. At CISA, we are working to raise the cybersecurity baseline for all Americans. Today is an important milestone in the security journey to encourage built-in security best practices and help us move beyond passwords. Cyber is a team sport, and we’re pleased to continue our collaboration."

The move to integrate a common and passwordless way to log in to applications and services to the different technology platforms operated by these companies would become available over the course of the coming year.

Passwordless logins have been increasingly looked at as a way to bypass the threat that weak passwords pose in the cyber security parlance.

With an increasing volume of cyber attacks everywhere on the web, users have been recommended by experts to set strong and unique passwords for each and every service they use and log in to.

Moreover, such a practice is typically complicated and even leads to users forgetting passwords.

The companies also stated that users would be able to use common login methods irrespective of the platform or operating system they use, which is where the partnership comes in.