Mr. Wataru Oogami received his B.Eng. degree in electrical and information engineering from Kyushu University in 2010 and M.Eng. degree in knowledge informatics from Kyoto University. He joined Yahoo Japan Corporation in 2012. He has been engaged in research and development of usability and security using user environment information as well as passwordless authentication technology primarily at Yahoo! JAPAN Research.

Mr. Oogami has made outstanding contributions to the development, international standardization, and commercialization of passwordless personal authentication technology. He extended the FIDO (Fast Identity Online) passwordless authentication protocol, which assumes a single authenticator, to a passwordless protocol applicable to authentication using multiple registered authenticators. Specifically, he proposed, implemented, verified the operation of, and evaluated the security of a FIDO (Fast Identity Online)-compliant passwordless multiple authenticator registration method and an authentication method using one of the registered authenticators. The developed registration method is useful for four typical combinations of the number of available authenticators inside and outside the user device and the transfer method of personally authenticated data between authenticators. The developed authentication method works for seven different combinations of the user browser function and the necessary conditions for security in service provider websites. Based on this authentication method, he also developed a quick and easy method for recovering access privileges in lost or stolen user devices. These methods are essential for commercial services and products, although they are not the FIDO authentication protocol itself. Mr. Oogami has contributed details of these technologies, implementations, and security evaluation results to FIDO standardization, and published a FIDO white paper as a co-editor. Within Japan, as the Co-Chair of a subgroup in the FIDO Japan Working Group, FIDO Alliance, he took a lead in FIDO technology dissemination and the coordination of stakeholders. He has developed FIDO-compliant systems and put them in the market always as first in the world, namely, the FIDO-compliant Yahoo! Japan (YJ) service authentication server for PCs (2015), the FIDO2-compliant YJ service authentication server for PCs (2018), and the FIDO2-compliant YJ authentication service system for Android devices (2018) and iOS devices (2020). In addition, he managed the project as the head to integrate FIDO authentication into the YJ internal authentication gateway, which was successfully completed in December 2019. A total of 17.5 million people have used the YJ service as of September, 2022 and about 300 Yahoo employees have benefited from the YJ internal authentication gateway from an Android or an iOS smartphone as well as a PC with a Windows or a macOS since December 2019.

As stated earlier, Mr. Oogami has made outstanding contributions to passwordless authentication technology and FIDO standardization and thus, deserves the IEICE SUEMATSU-Yasuharu Award.