The idea is not new, Estonia has been doing phone based authentication for years, but the timing is right.
Some college administrators say it's difficult to verify that students learned anything in MOOCs few students even complete them but Coursera and rivals Udacity and edX are rolling out proctored exams and web-based authentication tools to assess student performance.
But RSA, the security division of EMC, says 220 companies, including Target, Sears, Macy's, Sprint, T-Mobile and 14 of the 20 largest U.S. financial institutions, use its "knowledge-based authentication" (KBA) service and that it has a "false failure" rate (meaning folks flunking on erroneous public info) of less than 5%.
Google wants to hand off its proposal to standards bodies in the hopes that some form of PKI-based token authentication will be widely adopted by everyone from browser manufacturers, to website owners to device makers.
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PhoneFactor is one company that is gaining traction with two factor (strong) authentication based on mobile devices.
It did so by offering single sign-on, knowledge-based and multi-factor authentication options, which ensure that the right person signs the right document consistently.
In order to maintain a good, consistent consumer experience, both telcos and banks should stick to their current methods of registration, authentication (SIM based) and other data checks deemed necessary for checks while registering a user for financial transactions.
Most of these transactions involve SMS based payments, direct mobile billing using PIN and one time password authentication and mobile web payments.
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Handset manufacturers are also doing their bit by enabling NFC chip-based phones for NFC-enabled transactions that provide security of personal data with proper authentication.
In particular the web giant is exploring hardware authentication options and experimenting with a device called YubiKey -- a USB-based token system.
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