RSA announces two-factor strategy shift

Security firm to enter into partnerships to push its technology

Security specialist RSA has announced a major shift in its Secure ID authentication strategy at its annual conference in San Jose. The company said it is undertaking a series of new partnerships to push its two-factor authentication capabilities into a broad range of devices including mobile phones, USB devices and PCs.

The announcement sees the company move away from its traditional token-based approach, and focus on increasing usability and lowering the implementation costs of current authentication methods, according to RSA.

"With vendor partnerships [such as Motorola and SanDisk] we're able to populate consumer devices and make them Secure ID-ready, so you can download a seed record [encryption key] in order to provision that device," explained RSA's head of international marketing, Tim Pickard. "It will encourage greater consumer usage and [could be used] in an online banking or trading environment, or in an enterprise with a particular partner base or supply chain."

The company also launched the SID900 Transaction Signing Token, which is designed to give businesses and high net-worth customers a secure means of digitally "signing" online transactions, thus preventing man-in-the-middle and phishing attacks.