Security Architecture
December 20, 2010 | 
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With the introduction of cool mobile devices available for corporate world, executives feel their existing blackberry out of fashion. For a while, blackberry devices ruled the corporate world for mobile communications. They are efficient and highly secure.
Blackberry security is still considered the gold standard for enterprise mobile communications. However, with generation Y taking over the corporate world, enterprise infrastructure have hard time meeting their demand to have social networking and other mobile applications available on their mobile devices. RIM’s product is no more preferred; rather it is now one of the options that should be available to the corporate users.
There is also increasing demand among employees to use their personal mobile devices (individually liable) for enterprise use. They view pervasive wireless LAN (WLAN) and mobile cellular coverage as “must have” capabilities and consider smartphones as “must have” tools that would help integrate their personal and professional lives.
Until recently every enterprise had a web address advertised along with their products. Now, their applications are showing up in mobile device application (app) store and their mobile web addresses (example m.mycompany.com) are advertised along with their web address (example www.mycompany.com) increasing their competitiveness.
So how do we secure such diverse devices while making them available for corporate use?
Posted in Infrastructure, Security Architecture | 
Tags: Android, Architecture, Blackberry, Disk Wipeout, Encryption, Google, Information Security, iOS, iPad, iPhone, Malware, Mobile Device, Open Source, Operating System, Password, Smart Phone, Social Networking, Symbian | 
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The technique that uses both contextual and historical user information along with data supplied during an internet transaction to assess the probability of whether a user interaction is authentic or not is called risk based authentication.
Traditional username and password along with information such as who the user is, from where the user is logging in (IP address and information of the location from where the user is actually in at the time of transaction), velocity of the transaction (the process of verifying if its possible for a person who recently logged in from location 1 could login from location 2) and the type of device the user is using are considered as contextual information.
Passwords and personal identification numbers (PIN) are information that we need to remember since the day we started interacting with digital systems. Do we know the count of passwords we need to remember? Do we know if we forgot a password already? Some of these passwords also known as passphrase are long to remember that we need to come up with a pattern to create such passwords. We sometimes rely on tools such as a sticky, PDA or text file to store these lists of passwords.
Would it be easy to identify yourself as if you are been seen by another individual acknowledging their acquaintance with you? That’s exactly what a biometric authentication technology does. It uses a physical or psychological trait that the individual always has with him or her for identification and/or authentication.
In this system, the physical or psychological trait of an individual is measured, recorded and quantified to obtain a biometric enrollment. The system can be sure to a degree of certainty that a person is who he/she claims to be based on this initial enrollment. A template, which is a long string of alphanumeric characters that describes the characteristics or features of the person, is created at each enrollment based on a biometric algorithm. The algorithm that translates physical traits to a digital representation is called the biometric algorithm. The algorithm also allows matching of a newly created template (live template) with that of the initially created one. If the matching is not closed enough, the person will not be verified.
Posted in Access Control, Physical Security, Security Architecture | Tags: Architecture, Biometrics, Fraud Prevention, Identity Theft, Physical Security | No Comments »