Nok Nok Labs S3 Authentication Suite

Nok Nok Labs is a privately held, venture-backed security company founded in 2012 in Palo Alto by veterans from PGP, PayPal, and Netscape to address the persistent weaknesses of password-based authentication. Despite long-standing predictions about the “death of passwords,” credential sprawl has worsened with the growth of cloud services, mobile usage, and connected devices. Prior password-replacement approaches—OTP tokens, smartcards, and biometrics—have struggled to reach broad consumer adoption due to cost, interoperability gaps, scalability limits, and deployment and usability complexity, even as regulated sectors like online banking adopted stronger methods.

To remove a key barrier—lack of standards—Nok Nok Labs became a founding member of the FIDO Alliance (announced February 2013), which has grown to more than 260 members including major technology and payments companies. In December 2014, FIDO released its first specifications: UAF for passwordless mobile experiences and U2F for augmenting passwords with hardware tokens. These standards enable interoperable, cryptography-based authentication across devices without vendor lock-in, with rapid market momentum reflected in hundreds of certified products supporting billions of accounts.

Because specifications are not deployable products, Nok Nok Labs offers the S3 Authentication Suite: a full stack combining standardized mobile SDKs (including for non-native FIDO devices) and a scalable Authentication Server delivered on-premises or as a service. The App SDK supports multiple biometrics and fallbacks (PIN or out-of-band), uses device security elements (TPM, trusted execution environments), and incorporates configurable risk signals such as geolocation, travel speed, device health, and jailbreak detection. The server adds policy-based risk and behavior analytics, supports U2F and UAF, integrates with identity federation platforms, and exposes SAML, OpenID, and REST interfaces. The platform is positioned as extensible middleware for organizations needing a future-proof unified authentication stack, with strengths in breadth, scale, and standards leadership, but requiring integration effort and potentially higher cost than narrower alternatives.

• Nok Nok Labs is a privately held, venture-backed American company based in Palo Alto, California.
• Nok Nok Labs was founded in 2012 by security industry veterans from PGP, PayPal, and Netscape.
• Nok Nok Labs was one of the four founding members of the FIDO Alliance.
• The FIDO Alliance was publicly announced in February 2013.
• The FIDO Alliance comprises over 260 members.
• The first version of the FIDO specifications was published in December 2014.
• The initial FIDO specifications included Universal Authentication Framework (UAF) and Universal Second Factor (U2F).
• The FIDO specifications were developed in around 20 months.
• Over 300 certified FIDO products are available to more than 3 billion user accounts.
• Nok Nok App SDK is available for iOS and Android and supports Android Fingerprint API and Apple Touch ID.

• “Security experts have been predicting ‘death to passwords’ for over a decade, yet despite all their efforts and the number of strong authentication solutions available on the market, passwords are still very much alive.”
• “The company’s founders have always understood that a lack of standards was one of the primary inhibitors to broader adoption of strong authentication technologies.”
• “It is important to understand, that FIDO specifications are industry standards, not products.”
• “After all, UAF and U2F are written specifications and not products or open source projects ready for commercial deployment.”
• “The choice of authentication methods based on risk factors is policy-based and fully configurable.”
• “For businesses, it provides improved security, since there is no need to distribute and track separate security tokens and since all cryptographic operations are performed on the device, in an isolated trusted execution environment.”
• “This engine is also capable of detecting anomalies in user behavior to improve resiliency against hacking attacks and to minimize online fraud.”
• “Recently the company has incorporated support for U2F standard into the server as well, making it a universal solution for both password-less authentication and multifactor authentication scenarios.”
• “Still, it’s worth stressing that the company’s offering is itself not an off-the-shelf product that requires no further integration effort, but rather a middleware for incorporating strong authentication into existing or newly developed enterprise and consumer mobile and web applications.”
• “For larger companies looking for a flexible and future-proof replacement for their aging legacy authentication infrastructures, the Nok Nok Labs’ solution (essentially, a reference implementation of the FIDO standards) is definitely worth consideration.”