Time to Move to Better Authentication

“If you spend more on coffee than on IT security, then you will be hacked. What's more, you deserve to be hacked.”   - Richard Clarke

When Clarke made that statement years ago it sparked a debate inside the analyst team at Gartner. We asked "if an organization were to spend $100 a year more per employee where should it spend it to get the greatest improvement in security?" Aside from the few analysts that voted for security awareness training, who were laughed out of the room, the rest of us had no trouble settling on strong authentication. 

Strong authentication is any means that requires two or more factors, you pick them:

Something you know (password)

Something you have (hardware token, your computer, smart phone, smart card)

Something you are (fingerprint, retinal scan, voice print, even your gait or the way you type)

Where you are (geolocation)

The cost at the time for an RSA one time password (OTP) token was about $80/year to acquire and maintain. Since then the costs have come down considerably for OTP generating devices but can still be a daunting amount if you have lots of users.

Two things are driving innovation in strong authentication: the rapid move to web based services and the increased value of IT assets.  Be it a Salesforce.com or your stock trading account the value of information that you have access to is rising and the threats against those assets are growing with that value.

You may feel comfortable that you have deployed Microsoft Active Directory, require long passwords, and force people to login whenever they come on to the network but there is a whole class of users and assets that do not fall under this regime.  Think of all the Linux servers, firewalls, and routers on your network.  These are control points that are vulnerable to attack and most organizations still use admin passwords that are not bound to individuals, share those passwords with internal teams and outside vendors, and never reset them. This is were privileged access management comes into play. Xceedium, Cyber-Ark, Quest, and e-DMZ are some of the products used for privileged access management.

Strong authentication can have business value too. I had one client that managed a multi Listing service for realtors. They had 15,000 subscribers to their service but were concerned that every real estate office was sharing their  $39/month account.  By deploying strong authentication they more than covered their costs because their subscription numbers went up.  When eTrade deployed RSA tokens to 10,000 top account holders the money in those accounts went up 20% because of the increased perception of security.

Check out yubikey for a low cost token authentication solution.TriCipher is a certificate based solution that comes close to providing single signon for all of your web based accounts. It was just acquired this week by VMware.

What is one thing that everyone already has and will be reported and shut off immediately if it is lost or stolen? Cellphones of course.  Why not use them for strong out-of-band authentication?  This is the approach Arcot took.  They were acquired by CA this week.  PhoneFactor and the stealth mode Scio Security also have simple to deploy and use cell phone strong authentication.

Start investigating how strong authentication can reduce your exposure to theft and trauma. You may find that it increases your bottom line while making you more secure.