Yahoo! JAPAN R&D

Hidehito Gomi, Wataru Oogami, Shuji Yamaguchi, Yuya Ito, and Tomohiko Yoshioka received the 2021 IPSJ Industrial Achievement Award from Research, Development, Standardization, and Commercial Deployment of Passwordless Authentication.

They developed technologies for secure authentication using mobile devices such as smartphones equipped with a biometric authenticator（e.g., fingerprint and face）without additional devices and passwords and achieved the world-first commercial deployment as a service provider for Yahoo! JAPAN, the top internet service used by Japanese in terms of the average reaches a month on PC and mobile phones（Nielsen, 2021）. They contributed to promote WebAuthn（Web Authentication）, which is a technical authentication specification that was proposed by FIDO Alliance, a global security consortium for reducing reliance on passwords, and ratified as a web standard by W3C（World Wide Web Consortium）, an international community for developing open standards for the Web, through their implementation of passwordless authentication and publication of FIDO white papers as its editors. They also demonstrated the effectiveness of passwordless authentication through their usability study on their commercial platform for which more than 10 million Yahoo! JAPAN users enabled WebAuthn.