OpenID with Strong Authentication

As a conference last week, it was announced that TrustBearer OpenID will be one of two OpenID providers for the Microsoft HealthVault platform:

TrustBearer Labs’ OpenID service will allow HealthVault users to login securely to their account using multi-factor hardware authentication devices, such as smart cards, biometric readers, or security-enhanced mobile phones. The service uses challenge-response authentication to prevent common phishing and man-in-the-middle attacks, which are a growing concern of online service providers.

“Our objective is to give our customers choice and make their web experience easier, while helping them safeguard their privacy,” said George Scriban, senior product manager, Health Solutions Group, Microsoft. “We’re happy to be working with TrustBearer to give HealthVault users the option of using OpenID with their HealthVault account.”

A full story about the announcment can be found here.

We have a growing feature list from users of our OpenID by TrustBearer.  If you have a feature you would like to see - send us an email at: info@trustbearer.com  We’re really excited about our TrustBearer platform and how quickly and easily we can support new devices.  We will soon be releasing support for Advanced Card Systems (ACS) cards and tokens as well as a couple of others that we will announce later.  Stay tuned.  

We designed TrustBearer OpenID to thwart phishing and man-in-the-middle attacks.  We do this through a site verification scheme that occurs in the plugin.  It is done with PKI and also allows the issuer to delegate trust to other third parties.  Ultimately you get the best of all scenarios - simpler usage by reducing passwords, strong user authentication, and reduced phishing and man in the middle.

The well known open source content management system (CMS), Drupal, has released its 6.0 version, which included built-in support for the OpenID 2.0 specification.

Given Drupal’s CMS supremacy , we will likely see many more blogs and websites accepting OpenID in the near future.

It also worth noting the work of JanRain developing previous OpenID support in Drupal.