Today, the FIDO Alliance is pleased to welcome Raonsecure to its Board of Directors. In this Q&A with Dongypyo Hong, Raonsecure’s Chief Alliance Officer, the FIDO Alliance learns more about how the company is driving innovation for FIDO authentication in Korea and beyond.
Tell us a little bit about Raonsecure. What are your core product offerings? What industries and geographies do you cover?
Raonsecure is a Korean ICT information security leader and has supplied mobile security (mobile vaccine, virtual keyboard, PKI password authentication, EMM), PC security and IoT-based solutions mainly to financial institutions, government and enterprise. Our client SDK and server were in the first group of FIDO® Certified UAF products, and we deployed the first commercial FIDO implementation for a banking service in Korea. Currently, we have the largest number of commercial FIDO deployments in Korea.
In addition to our solutions, we provide various personal authentication services for individual users (B2C facing) such as our ‘USIM Smart Authentication’ and ‘USIM Simple Authentication’ services, offered jointly with the three domestic mobile communication companies in Korea. Through our subsidiary, Raon WhiteHat Center, we discover and train the next generation of information security officers. The WhiteHat Center’s teams have won several international hacking competitions, including Defcon CTF. They also engage in security consulting and auditing as well as pure threat analysis and research.
Why did Raonsecure decide to upgrade its membership from Sponsor to join the FIDO Board of Directors?
As the provider of a leading FIDO solution in Korea, we are firmly established as a leader in biometric authentication and want to be a part of shaping the next generation of the FIDO standard, while reflecting our specific regional situation. Further, we plan to do our best as a member of the FIDO Alliance Board of Directors to help the Korean biometric authentication industry make the leap to the global market.
We all know that there is a lot of FIDO innovation in Korea. How has Raonsecure engaged in the Korean marketplace, and what lessons from Korea do you think other geographies can learn?
In Korea, internet banking and mobile banking are some of the most advanced (as well as actively used) services in the world. In recent years, Raonsecure has been among the first to supply a FIDO Certified solution to those industries and commercialize it for banking services in Korea. Since then, we have helped construct most of the biometric authentication infrastructure in Korea – used by mobile carriers and fintech services among others. We believe that Raonsecure’s activities contribute to the growth not only of the domestic biometric authentication industry, but to changes in the overall authentication paradigm, and we would like to help further the development of the global biometric authentication industry. What we found with FIDO in Korea was that banks and financial institutions started a snowball rolling downhill that quickly expanded to lots of other types of industries.
In what ways do you believe your company can help the FIDO Alliance successfully fulfill its mission?
At present, the Korean people actively want enterprises and the government to come up with better and innovative methods to existing authentication methods used today. This has been a big part of the nationwide drive for FIDO adoption in so many industries. We look forward to sharing our know-how, accumulated through various deployments in Korea, with the Alliance. We will do our best as a FIDO board member to continue spreading the FIDO global biometric standard not only in Korea, but throughout the world.
