SWTICH is happy to announce the full support for the European Student Identifier in SWITCH edu-ID. SWITCH has worked with the university community to develop a solution approach that is easy for universities to implement.
Month: August 2023
Two-Step Login Changes
An increasing number of services and universities require edu-ID users to verify their identity with an additional factor in a process called Two-Step Login or Two-Factor Authentication.
One year ago, about 5% of all users had enabled this secure login method. As of today, this number has tripled to 15% of all 930’000 edu-ID users.
This is great news from a security point of view and has led to the following two changes that were introduced end of August 2023.
First step towards passwordless login: Username first!
A lot of identity providers, including Google, Microsoft and Apple, ask the users for their username first, and then proceed to the password input in a follow-up step – if at all! The future world will be passwordless. So it won’t make sense to gather any password in the future.
The edu-ID login has caught up to get ready for a passwordless world. As of 9 August 2023, the edu-ID login window has changed so that users first need to enter their e-mail address. In a next step, they enter their password.
This is an important change to support Passkeys for the edu-ID login in the near future. Users having Passkeys enabled will enter their username and then log in with their Passkeys instead of their password. That is, the edu-ID login first needs to know the user in order to decide which login method is the user’s preferred one.
We are sure that edu-ID users will embrace this new process as most of them are already familiar with it from other identity providers.