Lenovo, Intel, Synaptics and PayPal announced a collaborative effort to enable Lenovo customers to be able to authenticate to online FIDO-enabled services like PayPal by using a fingerprint instead of a password. The FIDO (Fast IDentity Online) Alliance is a non-profit organization formed in July 2012, to address the lack of interoperability among strong authentication devices as well as the problems users face with creating and remembering multiple usernames and passwords.

The goal of the collaboration is to reduce fraud and increase security, while making online authentication nearly frictionless with biometrics secured by built-in, hardware-level protection, said Lenovo in a statement.

The collaboration leverages Intel processors with Software Guard Extensions (SGX) to lay the groundwork for hardware-protected biometric authentication securing users’ FIDO credentials and biometric information. The Synaptics Natural ID fingerprint sensor features enterprise-level security with TLS 1.2 encryption and anti-spoofing algorithms. PayPal is being used for authentication.

[Image courtesy: FIDO Alliance]