The FIDO Alliance announced today that the US and UK governments have signed up to support the FIDO standard. This is great news as it starts the conversation for allowing the use of a FIDO authenticator to access government services.

As with any large organization with a variety of customers on a wide range of devices, the government faces extreme challenges in securing access to the services they provide. By joining the FIDO Alliance, they can both let their requirements be known as the specification is updated as well as to fully implement and support the use of FIDO in government-provided services, both internally-facing and externally-facing.

This is great news for 2FA in general as many times the government is a leading indicator to new technology (not always, and their lead-times are long, but when they think something is useful, they usually get involved early).