Basic concepts

The following sections outline the basic concepts of the OneSpan FIDO2 SDK.

Purpose of the OneSpan FIDO2 SDK

The OneSpan FIDO2 SDK can be used to implement the FIDO2 service and adapt it to individual needs for passwordless authentication. With the SDK, you can implement a standalone FIDO2 server to communicate with the relying party application and provide FIDO2 server-side operations.

FIDO

FIDO (Fast IDentity Online) is an organization whose main goal is to reduce users' reliance on passwords. It proposes several frameworks (protocols) that enable passwordless authentication. These frameworks make use of PKI (Public Key Infrastructure) and other cryptography standards to maintain a high level of security while performing authentication without passwords.

The FIDO Alliance has designed and proposed three main protocols:

• UAF (Universal Authentication Framework): Aims to substitute password authentication. It provides passwordless, multi-factor authentication.
• U2F (Universal Two-Factor Authentication): Improves password authentication by adding a second factor to the authentication process.
• FIDO2 (inc. WebAuthn): Newer than the UAF and U2F protocols and provides better security than password-only mechanisms.