Introducing Token
As consumers of the internet, we’re constantly faced with the fear that our data, our identity, and our digital lives are at risk of being hijacked by cybercriminals. The biggest contributor to this worry is certainly the broken method of using passwords to authenticate ourselves. But the problem is getting bigger than that. So much of what we use in the physical world to identify ourselves is being replaced with a digital version — the key associated with smart locks, the chipped version of our credit cards, and even our IDs. This piles a tremendous amount of things on top of the accounts we already have and struggle to keep secure.
And the advice we get when we’ve been hacked is “reset your password, turn on two-factor authentication” but that solution is complicated and more importantly — it costs us time. Simply put, we resist change when it requires us to compromise on convenience.
The internet is an amazing place that so many fight to ensure we all have free access to, but we must also fight for the internet to be safe, so we are free to enjoy and use it as we choose. Otherwise, the internet can be a place of incredible risk. And this perception has the potential to limit the extent to which people feel comfortable trusting more of their lives to be online.
Before it becomes even more of a status quo, we want to fix the approach to consumer security. Securing the databases, and network that our accounts, data, and so much of our lives exist on is critical but arguably, protecting the end-points (us!) is just as, if not more, important.
Today we announce, Token — the product of our combined fear of an internet full of untrusting, fearful, fatigued people. We built Token because we’re not OK with a future where people don’t feel safe online. We built Token because we too aren’t motivated to change our behavior unless we’re promised more time, or less work.
Token is the one place where all of your digital keys live — credit cards, house keys, website credentials, transit cards, car keys, your access badge — these are all artifacts you use to prove who you are. We built a secure environment for these artifacts to live on from a combination of asymmetric cryptography, biometrics, and a secure element. And we used the engrained behavior (swiping a card, entering a password, using house keys) as our benchmark for convenience — we didn’t build a feature unless we could make it faster and easier.
And, it’s up to you to figure out what you want to use Token to protect, or how you want Token to save you time. We’ve spent over a year building partnerships with organizations like Microsoft, Mastercard, HID, and Visa to make sure you could make this decision for yourself. And once you do, we think you’ll be surprised to find how familiar it feels it use Token.
