Alibaba Joins FIDO Alliance Board of Directors

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA and HANGZHOU, CHINA--(Marketwired - Sep 23, 2014) - The FIDO (Fast IDentity Online) Alliance (http://www.fidoalliance.org/), an industry consortium revolutionizing online authentication with standards for strong authentication, and Alibaba Group ("Alibaba") (NYSE: BABA), a world leading online and mobile commerce company, announced today that Alibaba has joined the FIDO Alliance as a board member. Alibaba's payments business, Alipay is among the first to deploy FIDO technology for secure payments authentication with FIDO Alliance founding member Nok Nok Labs. Committed to its mission to make it easy to do business anywhere, Alibaba can benefit those who rely on the largest online and mobile commerce company in the world with easy-to-use, secure, private FIDO authentication.

"Our many businesses and services are enriched by authentication that creates a better and more reliable user experience, as well as insightful risk management. We look forward to participating on the FIDO Alliance board, and assuring that commerce and authentication are uniquely cooperative and seamlessly compatible," said Ni Liang, Alibaba group, senior director, department of security.
"With their huge local and global influence, Alibaba is a very important addition to the FIDO ecosystem and a welcome member of the FIDO Alliance board of directors. The board will benefit greatly from Alibaba's experience and influence throughout Asia," said FIDO Alliance president Michael Barrett. "Pivotal organizations, like Alibaba, can rapidly impact adoption of FIDO authentication by facilitating strong authentication for its hundreds of millions of users. We enthusiastically welcome Alibaba to the FIDO Alliance board, and we anticipate their important influence on the first industry standards for universal strong authentication: FIDO standards."

FIDO Alliance members commit to share technology and collaborate to deliver open specifications for universal strong authentication that enables FIDO-compliant authentication methods to be interoperable, more secure and private, and easier-to-use.

FIDO specifications will support a full range of authentication technologies, including biometrics such as fingerprint, eye and iris scanners, voice and facial recognition, as well as further enabling existing solutions and communications standards, such as Trusted Platform Modules (TPM), USB Security Tokens, embedded Secure Elements (eSE), Smart Cards, Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), and Near Field Communication (NFC). The open specifications are being designed to be extensible and to accommodate future innovation, as well as protect existing investments. FIDO specifications allow the interaction of technologies within an interoperable infrastructure, enabling authentication choice to meet the distinct needs of users and organizations.

About Alibaba Group
Alibaba Group's mission is to make it easy to do business anywhere. The company is the largest online and mobile commerce company in the world in terms of gross merchandise volume. Founded in 1999, the company provides the fundamental technology infrastructure and marketing reach to help businesses leverage the power of the Internet to establish an online presence and conduct commerce with hundreds of millions of consumers and other businesses.

Alibaba Group's major businesses include:

• Taobao Marketplace (www.taobao.com), China's largest online shopping destination
• Tmall.com (www.tmall.com), China's largest online third-party platform for brands and retailers
• Juhuasuan (www.juhuasuan.com), China's most popular online group buying marketplace
• AliExpress (www.aliexpress.com), a global online marketplace for consumers to buy directly from China
• Alibaba.com (www.alibaba.com), China's largest global online wholesale platform for small businesses
• 1688.com (www.1688.com), a leading online wholesale marketplace in China
• Alibaba Cloud Computing (www.aliyun.com), a leading provider of cloud computing services to businesses and entrepreneurs

Alibaba Group also provides payment and escrow services on its marketplaces through its association with Alipay (www.alipay.com), a related company of Alibaba Group.

Through China Smart Logistics, a 48%-owned affiliate, Alibaba Group operates a central logistics information system that connects a network of express delivery companies in China.

About The FIDO Alliance
The FIDO (Fast IDentity Online) Alliance, www.fidoalliance.org, was formed in July 2012 to address the lack of interoperability among strong authentication technologies, and remedy the problems users face with creating and remembering multiple usernames and passwords. The Alliance plans to change the nature of authentication by developing standards-based specifications for simpler, stronger authentication that define an open, scalable, interoperable set of mechanisms that reduce reliance on passwords. FIDO authentication is stronger, private, and easier to use when authenticating to online services.

The FIDO Alliance Board of Directors includes leading global organizations: Alibaba Holdings (NYSE: BABA); ARM Holdings plc (LSE: ARM) (NASDAQ: ARMH); Bank of America Corporation (NYSE: BAC); BlackBerry®; CrucialTec (KRX: 114120); Discover Financial Services (NYSE: DFS); Google; IdentityX; Lenovo; MasterCard (NYSE: MA); Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT); Nok Nok Labs, Inc.; NXP Semiconductors N.V. (NASDAQ: NXPI); Oberthur Technologies OT; PayPal (NASDAQ: EBAY); Qualcomm, Inc. (NASDAQ: QCOM); RSA®; Samsung Electronics, Ltd (KOSCOM: SECL); Synaptics (NASDAQ: SYNA); Visa Inc. (NYSE: V); Yubico.