Simple and Streamlined FIDO Integration for Businesses
December 22, 2023
In parallel with the exponential growth of e-commerce services in the post-pandemic era, businesses around the world have been witnessing an increased number of payment fraud cases, specifically account takeovers and phishing attacks. As a consequence of those attacks, businesses of different sizes are losing much of their expenses on chargebacks and account password resets.
According to Forrester, the global average cost to reset a password stands at a stark USD 70, which can quickly add up to thousands or even millions of dollars per year, depending on the organization's size. While there hasn't been much done to lessen the loss, this is an alarming call for businesses to begin exploring and implementing security measures to keep the number of password resets low. For this, the world is introduced to FIDO authentication.
In this article, we will briefly go through the benefits that FIDO authentication brings to your end-users/ customers, its simple and streamlined integration process, and how you can begin your migration from password to passwordless as early as today.
What is FIDO Authentication and Where Can It be Used?
Long story short, FIDO is a global protocol for passwordless authentication, put forth by the FIDO Alliance - a consortium of technology leaders such as Apple, Google, and Microsoft to relieve the world’s burden on the legacy username and password method, while enhancing user experiences by incorporating convenient biometric or PIN-based authentication. FIDO standards such as passkeys, FIDO2, Universal Authentication Framework (UAF), Universal Second Factor (U2F) are developed by the Alliance.
As long as your platform requires users to login to an account by verifying their identity, whether done on a browser or an application, FIDO can be applied. Instead of using your current system to authenticate users using a username, password, and possibly second factor confirmation on an APP or via one-time passwords (OTP), your platform can leverage FIDO authentication. With FIDO, there will be absolutely no passwords to be exchanged with the public server, as compared to conventional password systems.
Leveraging public key cryptography, the user's login credentials are safely stored on their mobile devices, while a corresponding public key is stored on the public server for authentication verification. During authentication (when a user logs in to your platform), a challenge will be sent over to their device, requiring the presence of the private key and user's confirmation (using biometrics, PIN, etc.) to sign off the challenge. Throughout this process, the only thing that will be transmitted is the challenge itself, while both of the keys remain in place.
Benefits of FIDO Authentication
There are several benefits of FIDO Authentication, for both your business and users, let's find out what they are.
Passwordless authentication:
One of the biggest risks to digital security is password compromise. Stolen passwords make up 80% of web attacks and 50% of data breaches. This is why big players in the field have been implementing multi-factor authentication (MFA) to add another layer for access protection.
No Shared Secrets:
Ironically, passwords and common MFA deployments are often referred to as "shared secrets" between the users and the service's public server. With FIDO authentication, you can bid goodbye to this point of vulnerability because public key cryptography allows the user's private key to remain on their device and not share with any other party.
Ensuring User Privacy:
Since the pair of public-private keys used for authentication do not provide or expose any personal information, as well as do not create any traceable links between different servers or accounts the user may have, users can be relieved that their privacy is well protected.
Regulatory Compliance:
FIDO-based authentication satisfies or in some cases, exceeds cybersecurity standards set by government bodies such as PSD2 and NIST 800-63B in the United States. Additionally, increased adoption of FIDO by CISA and OMB definitely gives businesses more confidence to migrate to passwordless authentication.
Interoperability:
Being designed as an open-source standard, FIDO authentication can work seamlessly across different platforms without being bonded to a particular operating system, identity provider, or single sign-on service.
Reduced Costs:
Apart from password resets, OTPs, especially delivered through the SMS channel are bringing much cost into your operations. With the ability to login with FIDO authentication, your users will no longer have to receive OTP SMS and you will not have to spend a considerable amount on them year-after-year.
Sounds Great, How Can I Implement and Integrate?
For implementation, we currently provide two modes - On-premise and Cloud Service depending on your needs. From our experience, there is a split between our client pool in choosing between the two offered implementation modes.
On-Premise or Cloud Service?
For larger organizations such as banks, they would prefer to have the FIDO server deployed within their company, as an on-premise solution. The benefits of this mode are that it complies with regulations in some countries, and that the client can be responsible for managing and maintaining their server, under the guidance of HiTRUST. The downside of On-premise in the large amount of investment that is needed upfront for both hardware and implementation.
However, for small and medium businesses such as online stock trading platforms and digital banks, the preference is on Cloud Service. When compared with On-premise mode, Cloud Service offers a shorter implementation time period at a much lower cost. If your business operates in sectors and regions that do not require local server deployment, Cloud is the best option. Each and every year, our dedicated technical team will conduct system checks, maintenance, and upgrades. As opposed to the On-premise model, Cloud Service adopters do not have to spend on any hardware to host the server while being able to provide safe and convenient FIDO authentication service to your end-users.
System integration
Depending on your chosen mode of implementation, system integration might be a little, but not too different. Integration for FIDO Authentication solution involves testing environment preparation, SIT and UAT testing, Client integration, Relying Party API integration, authentication verification, database management, and backend integration.
Our system's design is focused on creating a seamless and code-free user experience to help your personnel work the administrative management (ADM) interface efficiently. The ADM system manager can easily assign different groups and roles, with specific access permissions to involve and empower the customer service team in assisting end-users at any time.
For the most part, we will provide certain assets (API/SDK) that your development team can integrate directly without much trouble. After successful integration, we still provide around-the-clock support and guidance whenever your team may need it. With the On-premise mode, you may choose to maintain the server by yourself under our guidelines, or request for our assistance with additional cost. For our Cloud Service users, all system maintenance activities are handled by us to ensure the most seamless experience possible for your team.
Secure Your Login and Payment Services Early
As online fraud threats continue to increase alongside e-commerce growth, your platforms will definitely need a safer alternative to legacy OTP systems that present much hacker interception risks. FIDO Authentication, despite being new to the e-commerce industry, has been implemented by the payments and banking sectors in the early 2010s for both the user's login, fund transfer, and cross-border online payment (in conjunction with 3-D Secure).
If your business is looking to up-level your system's security to prevent losses and account compromise from hackers, the time to begin the project is now. Contact HiTRUST today to get detailed consultations from our experts and draft up a plan to onboard your FIDO authentication project.