NREL Smart Grid Educational Series Webinar

Speaker: Arshad Noor, Founder & CTO of StrongAuth

Session: An Introduction to FIDO and Why it Matters

The FIDO Alliance is working to replace the dreaded userid/password with strong-authentication using new protocols. FIDO protocols use hardware Authenticators (aka Tokens) with Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) to enable digitally signing challenges sent by web-applications.

Some Authenticators blend in biometrics to authenticate users locally before using the ECC keys – all require the presence of a human user to activate the Authenticator before it can be used. FIDO is the security industry’s best hope for enabling a shift from “shared-secret authentication” – left over from the middle of the last century – to enable simpler, stronger authentication for the 21st.

Arshad will provide an overview of the currently standardized protocols and highlight the differences between them and X.509 digital certificate based strong-authentication. He will also provide a demonstration of how the protocols work, what tools exist in the marketplace and open-source community, and how attendees may get started exploring this technology to enable many new business capabilities within the ecosystem.

Speaker Bio:

Arshad Noor is the Founder & CTO of StrongAuth, Inc, a Silicon Valley company focused on cryptographic key-management for over 15 years. With 30+ years of IT experience, 17 of which have been in cryptographic key-management, Arshad brings a wealth of practical experience from having deployed key-management infrastructures for Central Banks, Bio-Technology companies, Payment Processors and some of the world’s largest companies in the Pharma, Telco, Finance and eCommerce sectors. Arshad is the creator of many open-source software products. His latest contributions to the internet-community have been – not surprisingly – in the strong-authentication space using one of the newest protocols from the FIDO Alliance.