Fresh from its successful Korean hackathons, an open industry association has expanded its developer challenge to the world stage.

Knowledge-based authentication like passwords and SMS OTPs has proved to be a major headache for users. It is also proving costly to maintain for businesses, which have been known to spend half of IT help desk costs on password reset tasks.

Consequently, by building on the success of a hackathon organized in Korea over the last few years, the FIDO Alliance is globally encouraging developer teams to create and present compelling and innovative applications leveraging FIDO standards and technologies.

The FIDO Developer Challenge takes place within a virtual format and focuses on implementation of the FIDO2 WebAuthn API. The challenge is open to students, individual developers, and pre-seed-stage companies. Projects should apply FIDO authentication protocols to address modern technical or social challenges within various fields such as Fintech, eCommerce, IoT, retail, blockchain, gaming and education.

The winning team will be invited to the Authenticate conference (18–20 Oct in Seattle) with all expenses paid by FIDO Alliance. In addition to exposure at that conference, the top three teams of the challenge will receive prizes and public recognition, and the unique opportunity to share their business vision with panels of early-stage investors.

Said Andrew Shikiar, Executive Director and Chief Marketing Officer, FIDO Alliance: “User authentication historically has been an afterthought for web developers, largely because more advanced capabilities were too difficult and couldn’t be utilized by most developers. With the WebAuthn API providing an open mechanism that includes advanced cryptographic protection that doesn’t require a security expert, and with billions of devices now supporting this functionality, now is the time for developers to get acquainted with FIDO Authentication.”

Teams will be able to use public web frameworks and/or SDKs from FIDO’s members and sponsors of the developer challenge. FIDO is looking forward to seeing the creative and technical capabilities of the broader web developer community, Shikiar said.The deadline to register is July 2, 2021.