Patent ID: 8312519

Claim:
A method for agile generation of one time passcodes (OTPs) in a security environment, the security environment having a validator and a token generator comprising a token generator algorithm, the method comprising: generating a client OTP at the token generator according to a variance technique; wherein the variance technique is selected from a set of variance techniques; receiving the client OTP at a validator, wherein the validator is different from the token generator; determining, at the validator, the variance technique used by the token generator to generate the client OTP; determining whether to validate the client OTP based on the client OTP and variance technique; validating the client OTP based on the determination; and where the variance technique is given by a function OTP=H(F(SKC, SKPC),InputSet), wherein H is a Hash and wherein the InputSet is a set comprising K and Time, wherein Time is the time for the OTP; wherein K is a key, SKC is a Symmetric Key certificate containing information about the key, F is a function or algorithm which switches among a plurality of OTP generation algorithms for each OTP generation, SKPC is a Symmetric Key Policy Certificate containing policy information about the key.