By Andrew Shikiar, Executive Director and CMO, FIDO Alliance
Yahoo! JAPAN is an industry pioneer known for being an early adopter of new technologies to improve the security and usability of its services for its customers. Today, the company is continuing that tradition with its adoption of passkeys across Apple’s iOS, iPad OS, MacOS, and Google’s Android operating systems.
“Yahoo! JAPAN is one of the first companies to support passkeys from Apple and Google,” said Yuya Ito, ID Division, Yahoo! JAPAN. “Passkeys solve the usability issues that FIDO authentication has traditionally faced and dramatically improve users’ difficulties in using FIDO authentication. Through these initiatives, Yahoo! JAPAN and the FIDO Alliance will promote the shift away from passwords and the spread of passkeys and contribute to providing more secure and simple authentication on the Web.”
Based on FIDO standards, passkeys are a replacement for passwords that provide faster, easier, and more secure sign-ins to websites and apps across a user’s devices. Unlike passwords, passkeys are always strong and phishing-resistant. Passkeys simplify account registration for apps and websites, are easy to use, work across most of a user’s devices, and even work on other devices within physical proximity.
Passkeys stand to fundamentally shift the way that consumers sign into apps and services across the web and across world, moving away from the burden and vulnerabilities of passwords and OTPs to a fundamentally stronger and simpler approach that allows users to sign in by taking the same action they use to unlock their device dozens of times each day – typically a biometric or local PIN code.
According to Yahoo! JAPAN, more than 70% of its active users use either SMS or FIDO-based biometric passwordless authentication. With passkeys, Yahoo! JAPAN’s customers can access their FIDO sign-in credentials on many of their devices, even new ones, without having to re-enroll every device on every account.
By enabling its users to sign in with passkeys, Yahoo! Japan continues to serve as a leading innovator in Japan and in the FIDO Alliance, where it has played a vital role on the Alliance’s Board of Directors, the FIDO Japan Working Group and other FIDO Alliance bodies.
