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This story is from the category Life
Date posted: 30/10/2009 Valuable information is increasingly stored remotely, but it's difficult to keep it safe without compromising convenience and accessibility for users. Last week, Uniloc, a company based in Irvine, CA, launched a product called EdgeID that promises to strengthen remote authentication by using consumers' devices as keys. Companies selling cloud services, and businesses offering remote access to employees, are becoming increasingly concerned about the security of remote access. "Everything can go into the cloud, [but] the identity of the user connecting to the system has to stay at the edge," says Paul Miller, Uniloc's chief marketing officer. In other words, a user always has to access data by some physical means. Miller believes that making devices an integral part of authentication will help companies define harder boundaries around their networks. EdgeID is part of a recent crop of authentication products that rely on automatically detecting additional information about users. Users seem to like the idea--a recent survey by the Ponemon Institute, a Michigan-based security research company, found that 70 percent of respondents would be willing to let online merchants use information about their computer hardware as part of the authentication system for an online purchase. And about 75 percent said they would prefer device authentication over passwords. However, some experts still question whether such schemes truly improve upon passwords, and whether they might be too inconvenient to catch on. To use EdgeID, users must first register a device, such as a laptop or smartphone, by installing a small software program. The program collects about 100 pieces of information about the device, ranging from basic facts like the hard disk serial number to details that evolve through wear on the system, such as the locations of bad sectors on the hard drive. These details are then transferred to a central server, which also runs software from EdgeID. See the full Story via external site: www.technologyreview.com Most recent stories in this category (Life): 17/05/2013: IT industry ignores silver surfers at its peril |
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