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Samsung SDS, a unit which is part of Samsung and in charge of a variety of ICT services, just announced that they have joined a global alliance conformed of various tech companies which have one goal in common, to develop a simpler authentication system that, at the same time, is more secure and stronger. With Samsung SDS inclusion to this affiliation, the company also announced their plans to release a simpler payment system based on fingerprints by the end of this same month. At first this payment system will be limited to South Korea, but Samsung stated that the service will be released worldwide at some point.
This alliance is called the Fast Identity Online Alliance or FIDO and has 190 members, some of which include Google, VISA, Qualcomm, PayPal, Microsoft, and most recently Samsung SDS. This association was formed back in 2012, and since then it has set the standards for account verifications, with a vision of creating the guidelines for all kinds of user authentication, including the previously mentioned fingerprint scanners, facial recognition, NFC (Near-Field Communication) chips, and voice recognition among others. FIDO is reducing how much users rely on passwords and will keep making advances in alternative authentication systems to both increase account security and limit password use to a minimum.
Samsung SDS joining FIDO is what set the grounds for the upcoming fingerprint scanner payments in South Korea, which according to the Korea Herald, is the second biometric authentication system to have received official certification from the association. But it is currently unknown if Samsung’s upcoming payment system will be a part of the Samsung Pay program. Samsung is one of the first companies moving at a fast pace towards a password free environment, not limited only to smartphones. The South Korean based company aims to include FIDO approved authentication alternatives in a wide number of their products -which require some level of security- such as smart home commodities. Samsung has also hinted on iris-scanning technologies, which will be another step towards this password-free future.
Samsung will continue to improve on these kind of biometric sensors as it did with the Galaxy S6’s fingerprint scanner, which greatly augmented the accuracy of the Galaxy S5’s. With such advances, a future without passwords is each day coming closer.