But FIDO’s white paper also includes another component, a proposed addition to its specification that would allow one of your existing devices, like your laptop, to act as a hardware token itself, similar to stand-alone Bluetooth authentication dongles, and provide physical authentication over Bluetooth. If you lost your iPhone and decide to switch to Android, or are moving between any other two digital ecosystems, the process may not be quite as smooth. If you lost your old iPhone, for example, and you’re unboxing a new one, the transfer process can happen simply through whatever setup flow Apple offers at the time.

The paper is conceptual, not technical, but after years of investment to integrate what are known as the FIDO2 and WebAuthn passwordless standards into Windows, Android, iOS, and more, everything is now riding on the success of this next step. FIDO's members collaborated to produce the paper, and they span chipmakers like Intel and Qualcomm, prominent platform developers like Amazon and Meta, financial institutions like American Express and Bank of America, and the developers of all major operating systems-Google, Microsoft, and Apple. On Thursday, the organization published a white paper that lays out FIDO's vision for solving the usability issues that have dogged passwordless features and, seemingly, kept them from achieving broad adoption.

Ten years into working on the issue, though, the FIDO Alliance, an industry association that specifically works on secure authentication, thinks it has finally identified the missing piece of the puzzle.

After years of tantalizing hints that a passwordless future is just around the corner, you're probably still not feeling any closer to that digital unshackling.

Usb fido bank of america