CEO & Founder
Yubico
Why nominated: In an era when login credentials often include Admin for a user name and Password1234, it’s good to know there are security stewards like Stina Ehrensvärd who continue to make password security a daily mission.
Profile: The last 12 months saw two of Ehrensvärd’s most important projects come to fruition. Her work to bring secure, passwordless login capability to the world through her company’s work with the open standards community, namely the FIDO Alliance and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) came to pass in April 2018 when the FIDO Alliance released FIDO2, a new open authentication standard for simple, secure account login and data protection without the need for passwords.
Over the last year (and decade), Stina Ehrensvärd continued to revolutionize the world of security hardware and authentication. Concepts such as a secure, passwordless login experience were once considered an ‘impossible dream’, but have been made a reality through Stina’s vision and Yubico’s contributions to the open standards community, namely the FIDO Alliance and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
The journey toward a passwordless future began in 2016 through the work of Yubico and others, and ultimately came to fruition in April of 2018. The FIDO Alliance released FIDO2, a new open authentication standard for simple, secure account login and data protection without the need for passwords along with the release of FIDO2’s core component, WebAuthn by W3C. WebAuthn is the web authentication API component of FIDO2, which is on track to be supported by all platforms and web browsers.
In January 2019 Ehrensvärd and Yubico expanded its potential product offerings debuting a prototype of adding an iPhone-friendly device, a Lightning- compatible authentication device, the YubiKey for Lightning. There is now a private preview program underway to encourage developers to build Yubikey support over lightning for their applications.
What colleagues say: “I’ve met few security leaders who are more passionate about their work than Stina. She is a consistent and guiding force to the greater cybersecurity ecosystem. The advancements that Stina and Yubico are setting forth, both in passwordless open standards work and security key product innovations, are not only groundbreaking for web authentication, but will forever change the internet as we know it.” - Martin Casado, general partner, Andreessen Horowitz.
Doug Olenick
