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How Both Cards and Mobile Devices Can Serve as Identity Tokens

How Both Cards and Mobile Devices Can Serve as Identity Tokens

How Both Cards and Mobile Devices Can Serve as Identity TokensJulian Lovelock, the VP of Product Marketing for ActivIdentity, a component of HID Global, has an article out on SecureID News exploring how cards and mobile devices can be used to secure your business rather than compromise it.

First, Lovelock’s vision of the future:

“Cards and smartphones will work together seamlessly within a centralized identity management system. Not only will this centralized system support the use of secure identities carried on both form factors; it also will support their use across multiple applications and on a growing range of digital platforms beyond smartphones including wearables.”

The question is, how do we get there? Lovelock says that businesses will have to change the way they do, well, business when it comes to Identity Management. One step he suggests is that “organizations will also want to give users the additional option of carrying these same multiple types of secure identities on smartphones and other mobile devices.”

He explains why:

“This will give users the ability to replace all previous mechanical keys and dedicated one-time password hardware with a single ID card. Using Bluetooth Smart or Near Field Communications technology, users will simply “tap in” with their card to gain access to facilities, VPNs, wireless networks and cloud- and web-based applications.”

Since plastic cards aren’t going away any time soon, it makes sense to try and incorporate them into your security architecture. On the other hand, granting access based on a card alone does not sound like too smart of an approach for obvious reasons, which is why he includes mobile devices into the mix. Here are some of the benefits Lovelock lists for incorporating mobile devices into your IAM solution:

“The use of mobile devices offers many convenience and security advantages, including the opportunity to use a smartphone’s Bluetooth Smart connection with gesture technology to open doors from a distance by rotating the device while approaching a mobile-enabled reader.”

Creating a holistic solution therefore requires building both types of “token” into your solution. Lovelock has some further advice on how to go about that:

“Organizations will have the opportunity to build unified solutions that ensure cards and phones can be used for secure access to the door as well as to data and cloud applications. The latest advances in converged back-of-house technologies enable strong authentication and card management capabilities for computer and network logon while also ensuring that physical and logical identities can be managed on a combination of plastic cards and smartphones.”

Furthermore, the IAM solution needs to be flexible and adaptable enough to scale and respond to evolving threats. Open standards-based solutions are a great way to ensure that this is the case, according to Lovelock. The solution you put in place will also need to be capable of “managing multiple ID numbers for multiple applications on multiple devices,” especially as machine-to-machine communication picks up. Finally, adding a biometric component to the authentication mix could further improve your security outcomes.

In the end, the goal is a “unified solution” that incorporates both cards and mobile devices in order to ensure that they help to improve your security and not undermine it.

You can check out Lovelock’s piece here.

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