The WiKID Blog

Viewing posts by root

Why did you release an open source version?

Posted by: root 16 years, 2 months ago

We want people to use our software.

We benefit from feedback from users whether they pay or not.

We want to partner, not just with proprietary software developers, but also open source projects and other 'dual source' companies.

We hope that evaluators will actually look at the code for weaknesses and help us make the product better. It ain't fixed until you've broken it.

We use open source software everyday and wanted to give something back.

Can I use WiKID for two-factor authentication for GDM/XDM/Gnome/KDE login?

Posted by: root 16 years, 2 months ago

Most Linux services use PAM, so 'Yes'. Just configure /etc/pam.d/login to use Radius and you should be good to go.

Will WiKID Strong Authentication work in my network?

Posted by: root 16 years, 2 months ago

The short answer is 'yes'. Chances are that your network devices, whether they are Cisco switches or Nortel VPN concentrators, a custom web-application or a home-baked Linux firewalls, WiKID will work out of the box. Additionally, we can add network protocols with relative ease, if you're not covered by Radius, LDAP or the other major protocols. Finally, we offer a simple API and implementations in a number of languages - Java, COM, Python, PHP and Ruby - so you can easily add two-factor authentication to your custom applications.

What do I do when my wireless device is out of network coverage and I want to login with my WiKID credentials?

Posted by: root 16 years, 2 months ago

The WiKID System falls back to a challenge-response mechanism, which is part of the Radius standard. After the user enters their PIN, if the device is out of wireless network coverage, the WiKID Two-factor Client will prompt the user for a Challenge.

If the user is logging in to a VPN service, for example, the user enters their username, but leaves the passcode box empty. The VPN service responds with the Challenge, which the user enters into the WiKID client.

The challenge is encrypted with the user’s PIN and an offline-challenge secret and presented to the user Base-62 encoded (to keep the length manageable). The user enters this response for a passcode. The VPN service sends the Username, the Challenge and the Response to the WiKID server. If the WiKID Server can decrypt the Response can get the Challenge, the user is granted access.

How can a software token be as secure as a hardware token?

Posted by: root 16 years, 2 months ago

Simple, really.

There are two factors: possession of the private key and knowledge of the PIN. The private key is stored on the client. Our PC client, for example, this key is in a password-protected PKS12 encrypted file. If someone steals this file and brute-force attacks it and gets the passcode, they are only half-way there.

They still need the PIN. The PIN is stored encrypted on the WiKID server. Losing the private key is the equivalent of losing a hardware token. You're only half-way there.

Typical software tokens store the PIN, the secret and the algorythm all in the client. Clearly this is not the way to do it.

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