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The WiKID Blog

Viewing posts from January, 2009

bob-blakely-and-radovan-semanek-on-the-end-of

Bob Blakely and Radovan Semančík are blogging about two-factor authentication and the problems with passwords. Bob thinks we should get rid of passwords this decade. Radovan thinks that it may be harder than that.

better-password-strength-just-one-factordeleteme

Pete over at Spire Security points out the obvvious(which alluded me):

As far as I can tell, Bruce Schneier's current Wired column, MySpace Passwords Aren't So Dumb, is intended to be taken seriously. The article is supposed to be about how "good" passwords on MySpace are these days, and there isn't a hint of irony in his statement:
"But seriously, passwords are getting better."
I am at a loss to explain how he can come to this conclusion when every single one of the 34,000 passwords he analyzed were stolen through a phishing attack. What he should have said was: "This shows that a 1-character password (the shortest they harvested) is just as secure as a 32-character password (the longest they harvested)"
He also points out that if you're not going to do two-factor authentication, then don't worry about long passwords. If any data is important enough or vulnerable enough to require a strong and therefore annoying password policy, use two-factor authentication.

blogdrums

I have had a bad case of the blogdrums, plus we've been busy working on our 3.0 release. We have just opened to the public our 3.0 beta release in an RPM version. So if you want to play around with two-factor authentication and help us out, please download.

buyability-and-usability

Today we turned on online purchasing for WiKID Strong Authentication licenses. It is a bit of an experiment in "buyability". A big hat tip to Dharmesh Shah's post on Usability vs. Buyability to clarify this point for me. We had focused on ease of use. We have provided ASP scripts that automate the two-factor roll-out process, for example and have an incredibly easy to use Web-interface on the WiKID server (IMHO - another hat tip to Brian Dame ;). We have attempted to take the risk out of buying WiKID by having an open-source version and by having a trial version of the commercial server available for download from the extranet. And we have set up a way to test the WiKID two-factor tokens without even providing an email address.

brand-damage-stock-price-and-cockroaches

Brand Damage versus Corporate Competence

Yesterday, Tim Erlin had an interesting and very thought provoking post about breach and brand damage.. Tim rightly takes offense at the idea of the infinite "brand damage" often used to sell information security products. With as little as infosec geeks know about marketing, it's probably best to avoid that phrase altogether. A "brand" is a nebulous idea at best and security probably does not matter at all in most brands. I think it is also hard to try to tie stock performance to brand value. There a lots of great stocks that sell commodity goods. If Exxon/Mobil had a security breach when oil was at $30/barrel, how would you measure the impact of the breach as oil goes to $60?

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