By John Leyden for The
Register
This article has been reproduced from The Register, with
permission.
Work on the initiatives comes a month after the US Federal
Financial Institutions Examination Council (FFIEC) issued new
guidance for banks on online authentication, which advised that
passwords alone are becoming insufficient in protecting a
consumer's bank account. The new guidance calls on banks to improve
their authentication mechanisms by the end of 2006, though it gave
no particular direction on what technology financial institutions
might decide to use.
"The lack of strong authentication in the online space is
demonstrably one of the most significant causes of identity theft,”
said Michael Barrett, co-chair of the Liberty Alliance Identity
Theft Prevention Group, and VP of security strategy at American
Express. "The recent FFIEC guidance on strong authentication will
likely change how organizations manage online identity threats, but
initiatives for addressing these issues need to be coordinated via
agreed industry standards."
Liberty is modeling the ID-SAFE technical development process on
identity specifications for federated identity management and Web
services. The group expects to release the first version of ID-SAFE
specifications sometime next year.
In related news, UK bank Lloyds TSB announced that it gone live
with a trial of two-factor authentication using technology from
Cryptomathic. The token-based technology, which generates a new
password every 30 seconds, will be tested by 30,000 internet
banking customers at Lloyds TSB.
© The Register
2005
