SDK provides WebAuthn for Nextcloud

Dr.-Ing. Dominik Schürmann
Dec 17, 2020 1 min read FIDO2, WebAuthn

Since Version 19, Nextcloud supports passwordless login with FIDO2 / WebAuthn. Currently, it works as a single factor, since user verification is not implemented. But in a future version, it will probably also use FIDO2 user verification, i.e., the hardware PIN or biometric readers.

Adding a WebAuthn device

Nextcloud ❤️ Hardware Security SDK

To provide a passwordless experience on Android, we teamed up with Portknox and Nextcloud’s Android developers. Portknox set up a Nextcloud instance for testing, which allowed us to try different combinations of security hardware and Nextcloud settings. With this, we were able to provide an WebAuthn integration using the WebView bridge. Like with our U2F integration, only ~20 lines were necessary. Our integration has been released in Nextcloud’s Android app 3.14.0.

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Dr.-Ing. Dominik Schürmann

Before founding the company, Dominik Schürmann was a researcher at the Technische Universität Braunschweig and worked on network security and cryptographic protocols. Yet, he did not lose sight of the usability aspects of IT security and conducted several user studies.