Smartcards reduce APT exposure, vendor claims

Smartcards can be used to mitigate an advanced persistent threat (APT) due to the security of the physical card, a company claims.

Hilding Arrehed, director of ActivIdentity which sells smartcards among other products and services, claimed that as the cards are used to login to a PC an attack would require a physical copy of the card.

“If a user loses a card they can revoke it if it is lost. With the RSA attack the attacker got the seed file and the tokens were compromised, with a smartcard there is no seed data and the access keys are generated inside the card.”

ActivIdentity said that too many organisations rely on older-generation perimeter defences and have weak internal authentication, which is why the APT strategy has been so effective.

Arrehed said employ strong one-time-password tokens with algorithms based on multiple variables (seed key, time and event counter) that are more resistant to compromise, and protect token seed files with strong encryption.

This article originally appeared at scmagazineuk.com