Data Protection: Partnership between Gemalto and Microsoft
- Gemalto announces the adoption of Microsoft U-Prove solution, to protect cardholders’ data. This new product was presented in February 2011 during the RSA Conferences in San Francisco. The partnership enabled the development of a smartcard endowed with U-Prove functionalities, to improve the security of online transactions and better protect cardholders’ data. The amount of information sent can in fact be limited when using U-Prove Tokens.
- The cardholder uses his smartcard to access his U-Prove tokens and benefit from Gemalto technologies (lower risk of attacks against the U-Prove tokens, help with improving security measures –non-transferability, unauthorized use of limited-use or expired tokens).
- Digital identity is currently debated and the security of personal data became a source of preoccupation (see “Data Protection: Personal Data and Social Networks”), this solution then appears to be of much interest.
- During these very same conferences, Gemalto also announced its Strong Authentication Server and Protiva OTP Tokens solution had been selected by Microsoft DirectAccess to enable two factors authentication of its users for distant access to companies’ applications and/or websites. This secure solution could challenge traditional VPNs, generally used by mobile employees (file sharing, dedicated business applications, etc.).