Posts Tagged ‘Architecture’
January 3, 2011 | 
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Face Biometric
Identity card issued by the employer is the typical mechanism to identify an employee. However, verifying each and every card presented by personnel requires a dedicated person or an automated system. Credentials, such as an identity card, are more effectively verified using an automated system. However most of the verification systems are incapable of verifying if the person who presented the credential is actually its owner. Similar is the case where passwords or PINs are used as credentials.
Buddy punching, otherwise known as ghost punching or proxy punching, is an activity where tardy and absent employees will have their co-workers “punch” the time clock for them. This activity alone will significantly impact profitability of a company that end up paying wages of employees who never showed up for work. The company not only get ripped off, but the entire operation may be degraded by shortage of personnel.
There is always a chance of sharing any type of information or material, which the employee is required to know or carry, granting unauthorized access to employer facilities. Use of biometrics will avoid such chances as the verification of the credential is on what the employee is – not on what they know or have. Finger print, hand print, face and eye are some of the popular biometrics used for personnel identification.
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.