The OpenID Foundation continues to support government partners, with the OpenID Foundation’s Chairman Nat Sakimura recently leading the organization's expert guidance to Japan's Financial Services Agency (FSA) on strengthening cybersecurity defences for securities and trading companies facing sophisticated phishing attacks.

Japanese financial firms have been experiencing increasingly sophisticated phishing and unauthorized access attacks, prompting the FSA to revise its supervisory guidelines with mandatory phishing resistant authentication requirements. Under Sakimura's leadership, the OpenID Foundation provided expert technical input on these security measures.

Several key areas where OpenID standards can strengthen Japan's financial cybersecurity were highlighted. Specifically, the Foundation recommended using the Shared Signals Framework for information sharing between operators (standards already recommended by the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and National Security Agency), API-first security approaches from the FAPI Working Group, and ongoing security monitoring rather than temporary measures.:

Global standards, local Impact

The OpenID Foundation’s feedback demonstrates how pressing local security issues can be remediated through the ecosystem wide application of existing, proven international standards. By providing guidance grounded on the latest and global best practices, the OpenID Foundation is helping to ensure Japan's new guidelines can deliver on their critical path objectives.

As cyber attacks continue to scale in their sophistication and harm they can cause, so governments, standards bodies and implementers need to remain not just vigilant but proactive.

About the OpenID Foundation

The OpenID Foundation (OIDF) is a global open standards body committed to helping people assert their identity wherever they choose. Founded in 2007, we are a community of technical experts leading the creation of open identity standards that are secure, interoperable, and privacy preserving. The Foundation’s OpenID Connect standard is now used by billions of people across millions of applications. In the last five years, the Financial Grade API has become the standard of choice for Open Banking and Open Data implementations, allowing people to access and share data across entities. Today, the OpenID Foundation’s standards are the connective tissue to enable people to assert their identity and access their data at scale, the scale of the internet, enabling “networks of networks” to interoperate globally. Individuals, companies, governments and non-profits are encouraged to join or participate. Find out more at openid.net.