We have written earlier this summer about the need for two-factor authentication solutions in the wake of various hacking scandals with compromised account sign-ons. A new solution from Confident Technologies called Multifactor Authentication is now available that makes two-factor as easy as clicking on a sequence of images on your smartphone. For those of us that are numerically challenged, it is an intriguing idea.
Like any two-factor notion, you have something that you carry around with you such as your cellphone, combined with a secret password to lock your account from intruders. Confident has you specify a sequence of images – such as dog, bird, and cars – that you have tap on your phone before you are allowed into your account. It is that simple. Even if someone else gained access to your phone, they still would have a hard time guessing the correct image sequence, even if they installed keyloggers on your phone to try to capture this information.
You can see a short video of how it works here, and you can try a live demo for yourself here. The service is priced at $5 per user per year. One small knock on the company’s demo site is that it shows an error code when you enter a slightly different URL. A security site should have better error trapping.
