Dear Readers,
This week’s blog is What is MFA(Multi-Factor Authentication)? MFA is quite simple, and organizations are focusing more than ever on creating a smooth user experience. Governments are implementing a Multi-Factor Authentication system.
Ambimat Electronics, with its experience of over four decades as an ODM of IoT products, wishes to draw the attention of its customers and readers of blog posts towards this upcoming field.
Introduction
To put it more accurately, its governments are under attack, all the time, at every level — federal, state, and local — from opportunistic scammers, sophisticated cybercriminals, and even state actors.
We’ve all seen the stories about intelligence services stealing political emails, snooping into election systems, and even penetrating the US power grid. But those are just the government cybersecurity breaches that make the front page. For every cyber attack the public hears about, there are undoubtedly thousands that go unnoticed — even by their victims. According to one recent study, attacks on state, local, territorial, and tribal governments rose 50% between 2017 and 2020. The authors suspect that those numbers actually understate the problem.
The reality is, government agencies are in a bind. On the one hand, they want to increase access to public information and make their operations faster and more efficient (especially during the pandemic when citizen services are rapidly moving online). On the other, they need to secure remote workers, protect sensitive PII (personally identifiable information), and keep the government’s critical infrastructure — including elections and democratic integrity — safe. And they have to do it all on tight budgets.
The cybersecurity measures government agencies have taken so far fall short. Passwords offer little protection and are easily forgotten. Simple multi-factor authentication (MFA) methods like SMS verification codes or secure mobile authentication apps can still be subject to phishing attacks. These options are better than nothing, but they’re not enough. Alternatively, smart cards offer strong authentication but are expensive and cumbersome to deploy (especially in the middle of a global pandemic!).
With the stakes as high as they are, and funding what it is, it’s becoming clear that government agencies need to move to a more scalable and economical form of strong authentication, like the AmbiSecure Key. In fact, there are several 2021 state and local tech priorities where hardware MFA plays an important role:
- Infrastructure and process modernization
- Supporting and enabling hybrid workforce and work
- Enabling connectivity and access
- Securing the new edge
Building a more secure remote work infrastructure
The shift to remote work has introduced a new distributed perimeter and exponentially more security vulnerabilities. Many IT leaders are having a difficult time re-establishing trust with the individuals accessing their systems. Hardware security key-based MFA can reduce the danger of man-in-the-middle attacks and provide greater flexibility for remote government workers, eliminating costs associated with mobile device-based authentication.
Enhancing security for digital services
More governments are providing digital services to constituents, a crucial part of ensuring business continuity during times of crisis. Government IT chiefs can streamline operations and strengthen security for both internal services, as well as external citizen-facing digital services, with hardware security key-based MFA that can be conveniently integrated into existing Identity and Access Management solutions. For example, modern FIDO2 and WebAuthn standards are the best-suited authentication methods for external customer-facing services.
Protecting critical election infrastructure
Top of mind currently, but essential for every election or referendum: how municipalities can adopt hardware-based MFA to secure voter registration databases, election management systems, e-poll books, and other election infrastructure using the strongest authentication possible to stop 100% of account takeovers. This is even more important when a large percentage of the users are temporary volunteers.
Government agencies have a special charge to protect the public, and many authentication methods aren’t up to the task. Around the world, government organizations including the British NCSC (National Cyber Security Centre) and European Union Agency For Cybersecurity (ENISA) are recommending the move to MFA solutions, of which hardware security key-based MFA is the strongest version.
The AmbiSecure Key helps organizations accelerate to a password-less future by providing support for the FIDO2 protocol. FIDO2 supports not only today’s two-factor authentication but also paves the way for eliminating weak password authentication, with strong single factor hardware-based authentication. The AmbiSecure Key provides a simple and intuitive authentication experience that users find easy to use, ensuring rapid adoption and organizational security. Ambisecure Keys do not require a battery or network connectivity, making authentication always accessible.
About Ambimat Electronics:
With design experience of close to 4 decades of excellence, world-class talent, and innovative breakthroughs, Ambimat Electronics is a single-stop solution enabler to Leading PSUs, private sector companies, and start-ups to deliver design capabilities and develop manufacturing capabilities in various industries and markets. AmbiIoT design services have helped develop Smartwatches, Smart homes, Medicals, Robotics, Retail, Pubs and brewery, Security.
Ambimat Electronics has come a long way to become one of India’s leading IoT(Internet of things) product designers and manufacturers today. We present below some of our solutions that can be implemented and parameterized according to specific business needs. AmbiPay, AmbiPower, AmbiCon, AmbiSecure, AmbiSense, AmbiAutomation.
To know more about us or what Ambimat does, we invite you to follow us on LinkedIn or visit our website.
