What is Fast IDentity Online (FIDO)?

It is an industry standard authentication scheme that:

• Eliminates passwords completely from web applications
• Addresses capabilities and vulnerabilities of the worldwide web (including mobile devices)
• Is an open, royalty-free industry standard available for anyone to implement
• Incorporates user privacy as a design principle
• Is extremely simple and easy to use by anyone

This chapter provides an introduction to FIDO, providing some history and context for why a new authentication protocol was created, and what distinguishes FIDO from all previous authentication capabilities. The rest of this manual provides detailed information on how to install and use StrongKey’s open-source FIDO2 server.