ActivIdentity Corporation has announced that Aberdeen Group has published a new market alert titled "The Case for Smart Cards". The study commissioned by ActivIdentity and HID Global explored the RSA SecureID breach and subsequent industry shift toward smart cards. The resulting paper identifies the breach as the primary market driver for this trend along with the erosion of traditional network perimeters, the weakness of traditional username and password authentication methods, and the potential compromise of privileged systems and accounts.
According to two recent Aberdeen research studies, "The Zen of Network Access" (December 2010) and the “Q1 2011 Aberdeen Business Review"(May 2011) - there was a noticeable shift in market trends in the area of end-user authentication, showing a decreased use of OTP by a factor of 2.5- to 3-times, whereas the demand for smart cards increased by a factor of 1.5- to 2-times. As noted in the "The Case for Smart Cards" paper, the multi-factor authentication provided by smart cards makes elevation of access privileges (as seen in the RSA attack) considerably harder, and also inhibits untrustworthy insiders.
"The study makes it clear that the old, perimeter-based defense model that has been used for decades is no longer effective by itself. Use at work of personal mobile devices, sophisticated malware and popularity of social networks are making it increasingly difficult to keep the perimeter secure. Companies are realizing that they need to implement strong authentication to secure access, even for users on the internal network," said Julian Lovelock, ActivIdentity's Senior Director - Product Marketing.
