Passwords are like gum on your shoe…

March 20, 2021 Nok Nok News 0 comments

We all hate passwords. That’s not a revelation. We all have too many, we can’t keep track of them, they are the top source of breaches, they cost organizations billions and Verizon reminds us every year of this!

So why are they so difficult to get rid of?

For the most part, it’s because up until recently there was nothing better. Passwords – a shared secret – provide a common way to authenticate across any device. But it’s a single factor that is easily compromised and no longer practical in our digital world where we have to remember, on average, 90 of them. To get around the inherent security weaknesses and user experience issues, companies have invested in risk signals, OTPs, session cookies and other add-on strategies. But at the end of the day, there is still an underlying password that can be compromised, and causes user friction.

The good news is that over the last 5 years, the fabric of identity and authentication has been undergoing a wholesale upgrade from username and passwords to cryptographic keys – aka FIDO. What that means is that you can replace 2 weak factors (for example passwords and OTPs) that are both vulnerable to phishing attacks (and both add friction!) with a strong multi-factor approach that is more convenient and more secure at the same time. Those factors are 1) the device that people already have (their phones, their PCs, their tablets) that are now cryptographically bound and 2) the user verification performed by the device (e.g. fingerprint sensor, facial recognition, PIN).

The FIDO protocols make it possible to replace passwords with strong multi-factor authentication that is very user friendly – a swipe of a finger, a look into your phone’s camera, typing your Windows Hello PIN, etc. Most users prefer these alternatives – Apple made them popular when they introduced TouchID. Most companies have implemented biometrics in their mobile apps to alleviate some of the password friction. Very often, however, the password is simply cached so that approach provides no improvement to security. And, when the user authenticates to the web version of an application either on their phone or PC, they’re back to… you guessed it… the annoying password.

Up until last year, one of the excuses for sticking with passwords was that Apple wasn’t on board yet with FIDO – so the puzzle was incomplete. That’s no longer the case as Safari now supports FIDO – joining Microsoft, Google, and Firefox Mozilla in the quest to eliminate passwords. Now that FIDO adoption across the ecosystem makes it practical to extend the “TouchID” concept to any device and channel, we can finally scrape off the gum. Can’t we? The challenge is that while it seems like a no-brainer – easier, more secure — it’s a change. Digital transformation requires cross functional support. Each stakeholder must understand the value to their organization, and why it makes sense to take a strategic, new approach versus more tactical add-ons. The organization must also have a clear roadmap for moving from the legacy approaches to the new paradigm — what I call “transition vision”.

Stay tuned for my next blogs where I’ll discuss aligning internal stakeholders on the many business benefits, the value of a strategic approach, as well as best practices for embarking on your journey to passwordless.

04 Mar

4 Min read

Why Intuit picked FIDO

March 4, 2021 Nok Nok News 0 comments

One of the long-time FIDO supporters gave testimony to its biggest benefits at the recent Authentication 2020 conference. The speaker was Marcio Mello, who is the head of Product for Intuit’s identity and profile platform. The benefits are saving money and time when users have to login to their SaaS financial offerings from Intuit.

Intuit was interested in FIDO for many years, and at the beginning of 2020 rolled out a FIDO application for iOS users of TurboTax, its tax preparation package. Now, if you are like me and if you use some form of this software, your goal is to spend as little time as possible using it. When you are done with your taxes and file them with the IRS, you hope this is the last time you will ever see this software until next year. Well, that works against usability in a big way, because most of us don’t remember our account passwords. Mello reminded his audience of this fact: “We have yearly active TurboTax users,” he said during his presentation. “Our users don’t come back anytime soon, so often they don’t remember their account sign-in information and then have to hassle with recovering their accounts.”

This is a perfect use case for FIDO, and Intuit created a new process so they wouldn’t have any passwords to remember. Their goal was to require as few clicks as possible to sign in. “We didn’t want to remain the identity police because we had a poor user experience,” he said. “With the old pre-FIDO ways, users had a lot of data entry to key in. The faster we can get them into our app, the better for everyone. This is because we are all in this together for a passwordless journey. And it is a long-term journey, because it isn’t just offering a quick fix.”

Intuit evaluated various FIDO vendors and picked NokNok’s S3 Authentication Suite. As part of their evaluation, they ran various stakeholder education sessions with everyone that would be involved in the rollout. They approached the project by first building the user interface for sign on and account management, then did a phased launch with the iOS version of TurboTax. Their goal was to get rid of OTP SMS for sign ins. Here is a diagram from Mello’s talk that outlines how they intended to evolve their user interface and authentication policies.

He mentioned during his presentation that FIDO offered many benefits:

The ability to future-proof identity standards that are also scalable and customizable.
An opportunity to lower our operational costs.
Improve both security and privacy by having identity credentials that remain on your mobile phone.
Adding friction at the appropriate times when users are doing something riskier on their accounts.

That last point is an important one, because it is a sign of assurance and mutual trust. Before FIDO, there was friction all over the place, which promoted just the opposite intention. They intended to use a combination of visible and invisible signals for fraud detection such as user behavior as part of the authentication process, which is the last line on the chart above.

So what happened? Their results were impressive. They found that since the beginning of the rollout in January 2020, there was a 99% reduction in users having to recover their authentication details and a corresponding big reduction in support costs and phone calls. There was also a 20% improvement in successful sign-ins, when previously moving the needle 1% had proven to be very difficult. There was a 60% reduction in the time it takes to onboard new users through account creation on the iOS app. They quickly got 2/3rd of mobile app sign-ins via FIDO and 23% of their users are now totally passwordless. “It is only a matter of time before all of our users will activate FIDO biometrics on their devices,” said Mello. As part of the FIDO project, they have extended FIDO authentication to other Intuit apps. “One of the advantages of FIDO is that we can customize how the initial authentication dialogs are presented for each of our applications. It isn’t a one-size-fits-all anymore around here.” They are also working on extending FIDO authentication in their browser applications leveraging Nok Nok’s ability to support passwordless authentication across any touchpoint – mobile app, mobile web, pc web and even SmartWatches.