However, most of the emphasis up to this point has been on the importance of developing security policies, conducting security gap assessments, training employees about security awareness, and the importance of instituting chain of trust partner agreements. After all, in addition to the policy component, security has a very important technical side. Entity authentication and access control are particularly important components of security and appear in all of these categories. Through authentication you know who you are doing business with and can establish trust. Although passwords are universally used for entity authentication, the real question is whether their time is past.
Passwords can easily be hacked, are often easy to guess and are frequently shared among co-workers.
This token is synchronized with an access server that has the same time, seed value, and algorithm along with the user name. Hardware tokens offer a 'zero footprint' solution. Software tokens can be deployed onto PDAs such as the Palm Pilot, smart phones and also desktops. Also, tokens provide ease of use and portability since they can be used on-site for network or application login, for remote access, in combination with Virtual Private Networks, or for access to a secure web site. The certificate contains a user s name, organizational affiliation, dates of certificate validity, as well as the user s public key in addition to other user-definable extensions.