Tim Cook’s company pays attention to the security issues of its applications, that is why Apple is offering its users a new security USB stick to protect their data and activities with the new update to its Safari browser.
This is a web authentication API called WebAuthn that works with a USB-based CTAP2 client-to-authenticator Protocol 2- that provides a higher level of protection than other types of passwords.
This type of authenticator is used as an additional option to protect those text-only passwords that can normally be damaged by hacking or simply by forgetting from their owners.
Apple has introduced this “experimental feature” to protect its users’ data, although it is not the first browser to do so. Firefox introduced this option in 2017, and Google has often tested it with its Chrome users.
Advantages of Apple Security USB stick for Safari
In fact, Google believes that the security keys of this kind are extremely effective in security matters. Since trying this option, they have completely eliminated phishing attacks after equipping 85,000 users with Titan Key hardware.
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WebAuthn is the result of an alliance between the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the FIDO Alliance, whose FIDO2 standard also supports Bluetooth connections and other means of communication in a close environment for hardware authentication. However, Apple’s security key test is designed exclusively for USB connections, meaning that users must insert the key when accessing sites that support CTAP or CTAP2, such as Dropbox and Twitter.
Although Apple considers this feature to be “experimental” in Safari, the company can integrate it later as a standard browser feature.