Entrust, Inc. today announced industry-leading updates to its popular mobile smart credential. In addition to offering a multi-purpose digital identity for secure physical, logical and cloud access, the Entrust IdentityGuard Mobile Smart Credential 2.0 offers new capabilities to complete identity-assured transactions, seamlessly and securely signing digital transactions and documents all from the convenience of a mobile device.
"Today's financial institutions, enterprises, and governments need to be ready to address the exponential growth of mobile device adoption and begin better leveraging this new technology to address day-to-day business needs," said Entrust President and CEO Bill Conner. "We know mobile architecture is significantly more secure than traditional PCs, making it an ideal avenue for convenient, secure digital signing of legally-binding documents and approving of critical transactions. Through the Entrust IdentityGuard Mobile Smart Credential 2.0, today's business leaders are now equipped with strong security they need to maximize the value of mobile devices."
The Entrust IdentityGuard Mobile Smart Credential now offers an effective defense against malware-based fraud attacks by empowering users to authenticate enterprise, web or cloud transactions via a mobile channel. By moving transactions out-of-band to the mobile channel, users cannot only review the exact details of the transaction they are about to perform, they can also confirm and approve them in real time from the convenience of their phone.
Through Entrust's updated mobile smart credential, enterprises and financial institutions can dramatically streamline business processes by eliminating requirements for in-person, paper-based signatures or desktop-bound digital signatures. Now, any document that requires formal approval can be signed directly from a phone or tablet – even documents requiring legally-binding, digital signatures.
"Authenticators such as passwords or hard tokens simply don't provide the same level of protection that one can find by using smart credentials on a mobile device. Additionally, paperwork slows down the process, frustrates employees and customers, and can even provide a roadblock to receiving revenue," said Conner. "By using a mobile device with a smart credential, companies can protect sensitive transactions of all types by stopping the transaction midstream and sending it to a mobile device for verification. Our new offering is a simple, 'what you see is what you sign' user environment, simplifying business and customer processes that may traditionally take hours or days."
The Mobile Smart Credential dramatically streamlines the provisioning of digital signature by leveraging mobile's smart phone application download process and enabling over-the-air encoding of digital identities. Furthermore, mobile identities eliminate the reliance on Java, Flash or desktop OS device drivers which have proven to be a great attack vector for identity compromising malware.
Additionally, the Entrust IdentityGuard Mobile Smart Credential 2.0 SDK now enables customers to seamlessly embed identity-based security into their own mobile applications for transparent mobile authentication. Doing so eliminates confusing and cumbersome passwords and Q&A security prompts for end users. By leveraging mobile smart credentials, Entrust helps banks and enterprises augment the value of their mobile applications by providing a simple, easy-to-understand mobile experience, while also being able to embed new mobile capabilities that can help drive greater security and business efficiency to ultimately improve the bottom line.
In addition to the new capabilities offered through Entrust IdentityGuard Mobile Smart Credential 2.0, users will continue to have access to the popular capabilities already offered by this service, including easy-to-use authenticators for physical, logical and cloud access, as well as out-of-band transaction verification and NFC and Bluetooth integration.
