eBay today announced its membership in the FIDO Alliance and its FIDO® Certified open source authentication server based on the FIDO UAF protocol. Standing with leading industry members among device manufacturers and software vendors, eBay is the first e-commerce company to directly achieve FIDO certification, and the first to open source a FIDO UAF authentication server. This is the latest development in eBay’s mission to foster dynamic collaboration and create expansive opportunity across the technology community at large.
eBay is extending the multifactor authentication dialogue by making contributions from its e-commerce platform perspective. Through its membership in the FIDO Alliance and open sourcing its FIDO UAF Server and Android client, eBay is championing the effort for open authentication standards in commerce. The company hopes to further the adoption of this technology and welcomes contributors from across the Alliance to help build the community.
“eBay is constantly looking for innovative ways to stimulate seamless end-to-end experiences for users across platforms. We believe that biometrics, such as fingerprint technologies, form the bedrock for future authentication methods,” said Rajeev Angal, Director, Trust and Identity Engineering at eBay. “eBay recognizes that there needs to be collaboration across different players like hardware, software and commerce in order to establish a set of industry standards for authentication. The FIDO Alliance standards are the foundation for this cross-industry collaboration and interoperability for both service providers like us and the consumer electronics companies providing personal digital devices.”
“By joining the Alliance and launching its open source implementations, eBay is showing clear innovation leadership as it positions web and mobile commerce globally for broad-scale deployment of industry standard FIDO authentication,” said Brett McDowell, executive director of the FIDO Alliance.
There is a growing expectation that users should be able to easily access online commerce sites from multiple and varying devices. As a result, companies need to ensure that authentication methods remain secure, private and frictionless in order to effectively mitigate potential risks for users. The FIDO Alliance is leading the path for this stronger, simpler multifactor authentication with open standards that promote interoperability of next-generation authentication technologies such as on-device biometrics. eBay is advancing next-generation device authentication for commerce platforms and accelerating the development of industrywide authentication standards for the benefit of its users.
These campaigns illustrate eBay’s strong commitment to open source and how the company is empowering engineers by allowing them to be the decision makers in how eBay.com is both built and used. In doing so, eBay is embodying its founding principles to create opportunity and
promote openness to achieve greater impact throughout the technology industry and improve the lives of its users.
About The FIDO Alliance
The FIDO (Fast IDentity Online) Alliance, www.fidoalliance.org, was formed in July 2012 to address the lack of interoperability among strong authentication technologies, and remedy the problems users face with creating and remembering multiple usernames and passwords. The FIDO Alliance is changing the nature of authentication with standards for simpler, stronger authentication that define an open, scalable, interoperable set of mechanisms that reduce reliance on passwords. FIDO authentication is stronger, private, and easier to use when authenticating to online services.