Coffee with the Council Podcast: Passwords Versus Passkeys: A Discussion with the FIDO Alliance
episode
Coffee with the Council By PCI Security Standards Council
22 min
3 speakers
2 chapters
transcribed 1 month ago
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This episode of Coffee with the Council is brought to you by our podcast sponsor, Faeroot. Welcome to our podcast series, Coffee with the Council. I'm Alicia Malone, Director of Communications and Public Relations for the PCI Security Standards Council. If you're like most citizens of the modern world, You've probably struggled to remember your password when signing into your computer, your mobile device, or any of the hundreds of websites and apps where your unique data is being held. This is complicated even further when trying to come up with a unique password for every one of those places and then having to change that password periodically whenever prompted by that device or website. It can become overwhelming and frustrating at times,
And even the best password manager can fall short. But what if there was a different way to authenticate that it's really you? What if there was a solution to reduce the world's reliance on passwords? That's exactly what we are going to discuss in today's episode. Today, I am joined by Megan Shamus, Chief Marketing Officer at the Fido Alliance, along with PCI SSC's own Andrew Jamieson, VP, Distinguished Standards Architect. Welcome to both of you. Thank you for having me.
Happy to be here.
So Megan, I want to start with you because you represent the FIDO Alliance, which is an open industry association with a focused mission to reduce the world's reliance on passwords. Tell me more about the FIDO Alliance and how it achieves this mission.
Thank you, Alicia. So you're right. The FIDO Alliance is an association. We're a member-driven organization. We have more than 250 members and we have a common goal. And it is a very focused and maybe audacious mission when you think about it to get rid of this dependency on passwords that we have. Because our use of passwords is really the reason why we see so much successful phishing attacks and account takeovers. Literally every data breach that we've had over the past 10 years when you see the headlines is a result of often just the loss of a password. It's only getting worse now as generative AI has made these kinds of attacks so much easier to perpetuate. And it's audacious because passwords are built into the fabric of the internet.
We all have used them. We have used them since the internet really was invented. We're trying to change that fabric with something that's fundamentally stronger and easier, and that's pass keys. So thank you for your question. We do three things to achieve this mission as an industry body. The primary thing that we do is we build and publish open specifications for phishing resistant user authentication. And that's where, you know, that's the backbone of Passkeys. We also have specs for secure device onboarding, which is the other piece of authentication, you know, when you have devices coming into your network, for example. We run certification programs to measure conformance and interoperability against those specifications.
And then we run market adoption programs to ensure widespread adoption of our technologies. And part of that is, you know, working with organizations like PCI and partnering together to ensure, you know, that we're getting the education out there about what we're doing.
So I want to talk a little bit more about these pass keys because not everyone may be familiar with this idea. So what are pass keys and can you talk about how they work?
Yeah, I'd be happy to. So pass keys are cryptographically secure sign-in credentials. You approve the use of a passkey for sign-in through something really easy to you, like using a biometric on your device or touching a security key. But when you ask how does it work, I think the best way to explain that is by comparing to what we do today with passwords and what we might call traditional multi-factor authentication, which is a password plus something else like a texted code or a push notification, for example. So in these scenarios, the user knows something. This is, they have to know it, whether it's a password or an OTP code, but the service also needs to know it in order to validate it, right?
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