‘AUTHENTICATE VIRTUAL SUMMIT: FOCUS ON EUROPE’ HELD BY FIDO ALLIANCE
On June 17th, 2021, the event ‘Authenticate Virtual Summit: Focus on Europe’ was held by FIDO Alliance with the participation of people from all around the world.
The matter of Increasing security and protecting consumer privacy by different means of digital authentication is growing at a very rapid pace in the European Union (EU) region due to the introduction of new regulations related to security issues in this area. During the event, experts on the authentication market in Europe provided insight into the latest developments including PSD2 SCA (Payment Services Directive Strong Customer Authentication), delegated authentication, eIDAS (electronic IDentification, Authentication and trust Services) and the EU Digital Wallet.
The Summit placed an emphasis on Europe’s new PSD2, which has a Strong Customer Authentication requirement that forces merchants to authenticate customers during the payment process. Despite the fact that the rule has improved security, it has also added friction, since merchants essentially have to complete an authentication process twice in order to complete a transaction. In terms of that, Nok Nok Products VP Rolf Lindemann and Mastercard Product Development VP Jonathan Grossar both argued that FIDO authentication can help remove some of that friction and streamline the e-payments process.
Other sessions of the Summit addressed Europe’s eIDAS standard and the European Commission’s growing interest in a Digital Wallet. The eIDAS scheme is intended to promote interoperability, so that identity solutions in one country belongs to EU region can still be valid in other countries within the EU region. The Digital Wallet could help fulfill that since it would allow people to link their identity to a trusted digital credential that could be used for a wide range of applications.
According to Steve Pannifer, COO of Consult Hyperion, digital identity consists of three things: identification, authentication and authorization. At the moment, FIDO’s products can fully capable of satisfying these three factors. FIDO has shown that products using FIDO technology can help enable convenient and safe in-person identification as well as online identification.
As a member of FIDO Alliance, MK Group participated in the event ‘Authenticate Virtual Summit: Focus on Europe’ as event sponsor. At the event, MK Group’s security key devices (tokens) have received much attention from potential customers as well as FIDO Alliance partners from around the world. Until now, FIDO® KeyPass S1 and FIDO® KeyPass S3 token products manufactured by MK Group have respectively received FIDO U2F and FIDO 2 certificates from FIDO Alliance in 2018 and 2020. With MK Group’s products, organizations, enterprises and people can fight against acts of fraud, stealing account access information on the internet such as skimming (stealing account information), phishing (scamming by email or fake sites) as well as man-in-the-middle.