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Security Missteps Made in the Name of Compliance

Posted by: admin 14 years, 10 months ago

In the Five Security Missteps made in the Name of Compliance, Bill Brenner lists "How to Botch Multi-factor Authentication" first.  The point is that if you open holes for users that have forgotten their hardware tokens, you have circumvented your own security, eliminating the value of two-factor authentication.

WiKID helps prevent the need for this type of circumvention in two ways. First, using the wireless tokens means that the user has to forget their Blackberry, iPhone, or Android smartphone which is much less likely because they actually like those things and/or need to have them for non-work related things.  Secondly, unlike most software tokens, WiKID is based on seat licensing and not on a per-license basis.  With shared-secret tokens, you get a list of seeds you can use.  You can only have extra by paying for them. With WiKID, each unique username is a seat license and each user can have more than one token.  A user with a forgotten token can be issued a new one, perhaps on a USB drive.  Obviously, you still have to properly validate the user is who they say they are, but you do not have to open a door for single-factor authentication.

Hopefully, managers worried about quickly meeting compliance goals will find this post, helping them to now make the second mistake: Failing to do enough research. 

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