The W3C and FIDO joint venture has reportedly revealed a new standard tool for strongly authenticating its websites and displacing the passwords. It is the first such initiative adopted by both the firms for standardizing and implementing strong authentication across the key internet browsers without any requirement of developing new MFA frameworks.

Incidentally, tech giants such as Mozilla, Google, and Microsoft have supported the new WebAuthn tool introduced by the W3C-FIDO alliance. Merely last month, both the World Wide Web Consortium and FIDO had certified and recommended WebAuthn protocol for the internet. The alliance now promotes the protocol as a platform that has the ability to offer secured authentication for internet users through its strong biometric application (making use of facial recognition and fingerprints for the user identification).

According to Michael Jones, one of the co-editors of WebAuthn specification, the new authentication is a challenge-response tool that uses secured public key cryptography with per-website pairs of keys rather than using simple passwords. He further added that it is a strong measure that enables practical, robust, & confidential data verification web protocol. Incidentally, experts claim WebAuthn to be a product of W3C’s team working on internet verification in alliance with FIDO.

The WebAuthn API specification's move to Candidate Recommendation signifies that W3C’s standard procedures determine WebAuthn as a tool that is extensively reviewed and fulfills the technical criteria set by the WebAuthn working team. According to the W3C and FIDO alliance, this is the second level of W3C standard procedures. Earlier, the standard protocol was endorsed from its initial status to the working draft status. It has been found to be technologically secure and will be further promoted to the third stage in the standard W3C process as per the planned candidate recommendations.

For the record, WebAuthn’s final phase is the W3C recommendation status, which is reserved for protocols to be recommended for installation widely in the future.