Re: Evaluating Two Factor Authentication

[Nick Owen <nowen () wikidsystems com>]

On Thu, Sep 30, 2010 at 8:49 PM, M.D.Mufambisi <mufambisi () gmail com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I will be evaluating 2 factor authentication scheme in the next coming days.
> Is there anyone who can point me to some good resources on this?
> Whitepapers..documents...anything?
>
> Regards

This is from my company, so "consider the source" ;) :
http://www.wikidsystems.com/webdemo/papers/Evaluating_Strong_Authentication_Systems.pdf

One question we get often is "Do you work with VPN X?" or whatever
service.  I recommend you go a level deeper and choose a standard
authentication protocol and then make that a requirement. Then, just
make sure that everyone supports your protocol.

I highly recommend you standardize on Radius. It is extremely well
supported and very simple to use.  What does it get you?  Linux via
pam-radius, apache via mod-auth-radius and windows via IAS/NPS.  You
can have your services talk radius directly to your two-factor
authentication server or have it go through a radius server such as
freeradius or IAS/NPS. The benefit of doing the latter is that IAS/NPS
will first validate that the user is the right AD group before
proxying the credentials to the auth server. Meaning there is only 1
location where a user needs to be disabled.

Here are a couple of how-to on IAS and NPS:
IAS: 
http://www.wikidsystems.com/support/wikid-support-center/how-to/how-to-configure-ias-to-support-two-factor-authentication/
NPS: http://www.networkworld.com/news/2010/050710-two-factor-authentication-through-windows-server.html
(somewhat product specific, but the architecture and steps are generic).

HTH,

Nick
--
Nick Owen
WiKID Systems, Inc.
404.962.8983
http://www.wikidsystems.com
Commercial/Open Source Two-Factor Authentication

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