Beyond passkeys, FIDO Alliance eyes password-free ID future

After reshaping online authentication by helping the industry move beyond passwords, the FIDO Alliance is setting its sights on a far broader challenge: making digital identity credentials secure, interoperable, and practical at global scale.

The standards body launched a new digital credentials initiative Dec. 5, 2025, creating a Digital Credentials Working Group to address fragmentation across identity wallets, credential issuers and relying parties. The effort marks a significant expansion of FIDO's mission, applying the same collaborative model that drove adoption of passkeys to a rapidly evolving and increasingly critical digital identity ecosystem.

"FIDO Alliance united the industry to solve the password problem," said FIDO CEO Andrew Shikiar. "We're now aiming to bring that same proven, collaborative model to the adjacent digital credentials landscape."

Digital credentials, including government-issued digital IDs, mobile driver's licenses, and credentials tied to payments or loyalty programs, are gaining momentum worldwide.

Governments are playing a leading role: the European Digital Identity Wallet program is on track to provide digital identities to citizens across all 27 EU member states by the end of 2026, while 18 U.S. departments of motor vehicles have already issued standards-based mobile driver's licenses to more than 5 million Americans.

Despite that progress, adoption has been slowed by a lack of global alignment. Wallets, issuers and relying parties often operate under different technical, security and privacy assumptions, and no comprehensive certification framework exists to validate that credentials are handled safely and consistently across systems.

Three core workstreams

FIDO created three workstreams to address these gaps. The first is wallet certification, which will establish criteria to ensure digital wallets meet baseline expectations for security, privacy protection and interoperability. For issuers and relying parties, certification would provide assurance that credentials are provisioned, stored and presented appropriately throughout their lifecycle.

Second, the alliance plans to develop complementary specifications that build on rather than replace existing standards from groups such as ISO, the OpenID Foundation, and the W3C. This includes expanding FIDO's existing cross-device authentication protocols to support credential presentation across devices, as well as defining new credential schemes where emerging use cases demand them, including potential applications in payments and loyalty.

The third focus area centers on usability and relying-party enablement. Drawing lessons from the rollout of passkeys, FIDO intends to provide implementation guidance, tooling and branding to reduce friction for service providers and accelerate adoption without compromising user experience, a factor widely seen as decisive in scaling new identity technologies.

Industry buy-in

Industry partners broadly welcomed the initiative. The OpenID Foundation described it as an important step toward building a secure, interoperable identity ecosystem grounded in open, privacy-preserving standards. The World Wide Web Consortium emphasized the need for broad cooperation across standards bodies, noting that no single organization can address the complexity of digital identity alone.

In the payments sphere, EMVCo highlighted ongoing collaboration with FIDO around digital identity and verifiable credentials, particularly as identity plays a growing role in authentication, agentic payments and digital wallet use cases. The OpenWallet Foundation also pointed to FIDO specifications as already foundational to today's wallet landscape, calling the expansion into digital credentials a natural next step.

Work on the initiative is already underway, with initial deliverables expected in 2026. If successful, the effort could pave the way for digital credentials to become as commonplace, and as trusted as passkeys, enabling users to prove identity or eligibility without passwords, unnecessary data exposure or platform lock-in.

For FIDO, the initiative represents both continuity and evolution: extending its original mission beyond authentication to help secure the entire digital identity lifecycle.

Notice to readers: These are archived articles. Contact information, links and other details may be out of date. We regret any inconvenience.