In late July RSA, the security arm of EMC, acquired PassBan for an undisclosed amount and it will now be under RSA’s Identity Access Management division.
PassBan combines several factors for authenticating a user coming from their mobile device and utilizes biometric techniques such as voice and facial recognition, location information, motion verification and tokens all through the user’s mobile device. Unlike most authentication services, this is delivered at the individual level rather than to businesses. Users install this mobile application and choose what level of security they would like to have for their phone and each application, and the various authentication techniques are then performed depending on this desired level of security. External factors may also influence what forms of authentication are used. For example, if the user is in noisy location they could use facial recognition over voice recognition.
The technology behind the PassBan will fit in to RSA’s Identity Access Management (IAM) vision. It offers risk-based, intelligence driven authentication and access controls through an implementation that is made for mobile and cloud infrastructures. Following RSA’s other recent acquisition of Aveska, another IAM company, PassBan’s technology will be used to build the next release of the RSA Authentication Manager platform.
Through this acquisition RSA wants to extend the level of convenience consumers have grown accustomed to with mobile access within the enterprise level authentication space. At this time it is unclear if RSA will continue to run PassBan’s consumer service PassBoard in the future, or if the acquisition was just for the technology behind it.
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