Growth in two-factor authentication

WHILE SOME IN THE BIG BUSINESS end of town and government departments are preoccupied with going down the biometric security path, there are others looking at two-factor authentication.

Two-factor authentication is the use of two independent mechanisms for authentication, such as a smart card and a password, says the TechEncyclopedia. The combination is less likely to allow abuse than either one on its own.

Australia has in excess of $5 billion in fraud and organised crime per year, according to Cisco’s Kevin Bloch, regional manager for advanced technologies and new markets. He says biometrics is a small, very niche, security fix, when we need a longterm crime solution.

To date there has not been widespread adoption of biometric security. “From our perspective, two-factor authentication would be the thing people would think about in terms of identity management and authentication, rather than biometric-type identification,” says Express Data’s general manager for sales, Mal Shaw. In the past, many companies thought they only needed strong authentication or two-factor authentication if they were using it for secure remote or mobile access.

“Today though, the threat can just as easily come from within the organisation, people accessing information they shouldn’t access,” says Gavin Jarvis, general manager channels, RSA Security Australia. “We’ve seen growth across the two-factor authentication market.”

It has astounded some security players that some banks believe it is cheaper to put up with the phishing attacks, fraud and vulnerabilities of user-name and passwords, than to provide two-factor authentication security to their customers.

Secure Computing’s A/NZ country manager, Eric Krieger, says despite public embarrassments over disclosure of security breaches, it has not changed. “Some banks in Australia are reluctant to go two-factor authentication. They don’t believe they’d give a return on investment to their investors, because they’d have to spend some money upfront for infrastructure.

“I believe customers are left vulnerable because of the intransigence of some of these large banks,” he says.