[December 16, 2014]

Swivel Secure Announces Support for OATH OCRA Authentication

Swivel Secure, a global leader in strong authentication, today announces the integration of the Initiative for Open AuTHentication (OATH (News - Alert)) Challenge Response Algorithm (OCRA) in its authentication platform.

The move to integrate support for OCRA into v3.10 of the Swivel authentication platform reflects its increasing deployment in major banks and financial institutions, many of which insist on OCRA utilisation in their authentication gateways for corporate data, remote network access and cloud based software tools.

"As with all of Swivel Secure's research and development, support for OCRA has been integrated in response to the needs of our customers," comments Chris Russell, CTO, Swivel Secure. "In recent years, Swivel has gained real traction in the glbal banking and finance sector and, as a result, we have seen an increase in the number of requests for OATH OCRA support so it now makes sense to build this into our platform. We strongly support the goals of OATH; since Swivel's inception, we have been advocates of challenge-response authentication and we applaud all efforts to promote its deployment around the world."

OCRA has been developed by the Initiative for Open AuTHentication (OATH), an industry-wide collaboration of security stakeholders created to develop an open reference architecture leveraging existing standards for the universal adoption of strong authentication.

"Swivel Secure's ethos is to enable organisations everywhere to secure all of their digital access requests with the most appropriate level of authentication, as defined by the customer," adds Russell. "This matching process can be adapted to take into account a whole variety of factors, such as who the user is, what service the user is trying to access, their IP address or the kind of device they are using. Our support for OATH OCRA illustrates this approach; it enables our customers to apply this specific challenge response algorithm, within their Swivel deployments, as they see fit."

Offering the widest range of user deployment options available, the Swivel platform offers the choice of mobile apps, SMS and interactive voice response channels when full multi-factor authentication is required. Swivel customers can also opt to utilise PINsafe, Swivel's unique, patented one-time-code extraction protocol. PINsafe combines the use of registered PINs with random ten digit security strings that are sent to the user via SMS, mobile app, telephone, or web. The user combines the PIN with the string in order to work out their unique one-time access code. This protocol puts the user right at the heart of Swivel's strong multifactor authentication process.

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