June 22, 2009 - As companies fight to secure their data from unwanted intrusion, they now expect their staff to remember an ever increasing number of username and password combinations. In light of this, support departments are spending more and more of their time resetting forgotten passwords. Two factor Authentication (2FA) is a popular alternative as it reduces this complexity by requiring users to own something and to know something – the two factors. However, even here, there are support issues as systems have to be installed and deployed and the users educated.

Bulwark Technologies LLC, the Value Added Distributor for CRYPTOCard products in the Middle East announces the availability of CRYPTOCard's new CRYPTO-MAS service, which provides a fully managed 2FA service. CRYPTO-MAS was launched at the Bulwark Partner Meet on May 14, 2009 and is now made available through the channel partners of Bulwark Technologies. The solution redirects user login requests from a company's authentication device to its own secure servers. If the correct credentials are provided, the user is allowed to access permitted network resources as normal.

CRYPTO-MAS supports most authentication devices and essentially assumes the RADIUS authentication process, requiring a device reconfiguration to relay incoming user login requests to the remote servers. It entails simply configuring the end-user device to use an external RADIUS server - the CRYPTOMAS servers.

Once the customers sign up for the CRYPTO-MAS service through any of the channel partners, CRYPTOCard provides configuration instructions and sets up an administrative account for access to the CRYPTO-MAS portal; it is from here that users and tokens can be managed. The portal interface is simple to use and users can be organized into groups which can identify areas such as the department that they belong to, or their access method.

For One-Time Password (OTP) creation, CRYPTOCard offers a choice selection of hardware, software, Blackberry and SMS tokens. Tokens can be mixed and matched within the company and provide selected users with more than one type if required. The hardware tokens have a long life span and some come with replaceable batteries.

Mr. Jose Thomas, Director of Operations at Bulwark Technologies comments “With the availability of CRYPTO-MAS, customers can implement the password security within minutes for the remote users to connect through VPN for mail access, application access etc. without the fear of password phishing. Starting from 5 users onwards it could be scalable to any number depending on the customer’s requirement. CRYPTO-MAS support most of the Firewall UTM / SSL appliances available in the market and without changing any devices or installing any additional server components, customers can add on password security especially for their remote users.”

2FA is a far more elegant solution to traditional access security methods and the CRYPTO-MAS managed service simplifies it even further. It offers very strong security, is simple to deploy and manage, and is an extremely cost effective solution.