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The WiKID Blog

Viewing posts from January, 2009

not-bad-for-a-cubicle-on-strong-authentication

Not Bad for a Cubicle has a post on strong authentication - more blogging driven by Bruce Schneier's posts. It's well balanced and insightful.

on-the-security-of-software-tokens-for-two-factor

Securology has a post about RSA's software tokens. In it, two key issues with are raised, one is specific to tokens that use symmetric encryption such as the RSA software tokens:

Distributing the seed record requires a confidential channel to ensure that it is not perfectly duplicated in transit. Distributing seed records to many of the supported platforms of soft token vendors involves plaintext transmission, such as sending the seed record as an email attachment to a Blackberry client. An administrator may provision the seed record encrypted using an initial passphrase that is distributed out-of-band, but it is common practice for seed records and initial passphrases to be distributed side-by-side. Whereas a physical token can only be in one place at a time, a soft token could be perfectly duplicated by an eavesdropper, even complete with its initial passphrase (especially when it isn't distributed out of band). If Alice receives her soft token and changes its passphrase, Eve could keep her perfect copy with the intial passphrase or choose to change the passphrase-- either way, the back end of the one-time-password authentication system will receive a valid token code (time value encrypted with the seed record).
Note that this is not an issue with WiKID's software tokens as we use public key encryption. The private key remains on the device and only the public key is transmitted. It is the out-of-band method of verifying the user's registration code that matters for WiKID. This could be done over the phone or via an application which uses some existing trusted information or credentials. (We protect against a man-in-the-middle attack in this process by hashing the registration code with the WiKID server's public key before presenting it to the user. Thus, if someone is trying to impersonate the server, the registration with the real server will fail.)

open-source-two-factor-authentication-for-google

Gotta love open source. To paraphrase, if the project you are looking for doesn't exist, just wait (or start it yourself). I've been wanting to do a proof-of-concept on adding two-factor authentication to Google Apps for you Domain for a long time. And while we will probably put this functionality into the WiKID server down the road, I wanted something right now :).

over-15-000-downloads

Congratulations to us. We've had over 15,000 downloads from sourceforge.net alone.

open-source-momentum-and-spending-during-the

Hat Tip: Slashdot, From ComputerWorld:

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