Last week in Seoul, FIDO Alliance held a seminar for 300+ attendees eager to learn more about FIDO authentication. A big highlight was the case study track in the afternoon, which gave us a glimpse into the rise of FIDO Authentication in Asia, notably Korea and Japan. Here are a few notable takeaways from these sessions:
SK Telecom: With its 47,000 employees and more than 500 enterprise applications, SK Telecom (SKT) parent company SK in Korea deals with credential stuffing threats on a daily basis. To combat this issue, SKT has implemented FIDO for its Group Mobile Portal (GMP), which includes applications such as company mail, calendars and many others. Since implementing FIDO biometric login, SKT has reduced login time from 30 seconds to only five seconds, and now experiences zero successful credential stuffing attacks. This data showcases how FIDO can provide both increased productivity and security for the enterprise.
LINE: LINE announced at the seminar it has deployed FIDO2 for their mobile payment service “LINE Pay” for iOS as a native app with whitebox encryption and attestation. LINE Pay has more than 40 million users. Next, LINE plans to leverage FIDO authentication in more of its platforms including LINE Pay Android, payments in the LINE app or on the web, and in other countries. LINE’s FIDO deployment comes in addition to several other new deployments in Japan, as we heard from NTT DOCOMO, including Yahoo! Japan, Fujitsu and Japan Post Bank.
Samsung Mobile: Samsung has long supported FIDO standards, implementing FIDO biometrics five years ago on its Samsung Galaxy S5 handset. Last year, Samsung became the world’s first company to achieve FIDO Alliance Biometric Component Certification for its S10/S10+ handsets. Samsung also reported that over 90% of its products are now IoT-ready. Next up, Samsung plans to work on implementing FIDO2 on its proprietary web browser, Samsung Internet, to make Samsung devices “completely FIDO ready.”
In addition to these deployments we heard about at the seminar, we were also pleased to learn that the Korean Government has implemented FIDO for login to several e-government services and plans to implement FIDO2 early next year. Look out for a case study on this implementation soon.
Another highlight from the event was the awards ceremony for the Korea Hackathon, which we wrote about in July — watch for another post for information coming soon on the winners and their innovative FIDO implementations.
