News.com has an interview with ActivCard’s CEO Steven Humphreys. ActivCard is an identity-management software maker. Some excerpts:
You have cards to get into your building; you have passwords; you have tokens. Now some people have biometrics. It’s all about managing identities.
On one card I have all of my passwords. With a card in a laptop with valid serial numbers, whenever I go to one of my sites whose password I’ve saved, it pulls the user ID and password off, and I don’t even need to deal with it. So password consolidation is there. The security is there. The physical access as well as the logical access and local encryption and security are there. And when I go remotely, the one-time use passwords are there. People are already doing all these things.
Companies are finding that they are already managing identity–but in a fragmented way. When they integrate it, then they actually get cost reductions. That is why this is taking off in the enterprise space.
The big thing was to get the external readers to drop in price. A smart card reader used to cost about $100 per user; it now costs $10. And the cost of goods is under $5. That’s made a big difference.
Smart Cards+T
