RSA Teams to Bolster Security for Apple, Google, RIM Devices

SAN FRANCISCO — RSA, the security division of EMC, today said it would collaborate with several mobile and virtualization platform vendors to integrate RSA two-factor authentication and risk-detection technologies.

The goal of the “Secure by RSA Certified Mobile Partner Program,” is to optimize RSA SecurID two-factor authentication and RSA’s Adaptive Authentication for mobile applications for Apple iOS platform, Google Android and RIM BlackBerry devices, the company said. RSA also wants to adapt some of the anti-fraud technology typically used by banks today for future use in mobile devices and applications for high-risk use, such as payments, to detect suspicious activities.

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The announcement, made during the RSA Conference 2012, includes support from Appcelerator, Citrix, FeedHenry, Good Technology, Juniper Networks, VMware and Zscaler.

According to Sam Curry, chief technology officer for identity protection at RSA, RSA is teaming up with these vendors under the program to not only optimize its SecurID two-factor authentication but to seed the way for new types of anti-fraud services to work well in a mobile environment.

The idea is “continuous, risk-aware user identification,” said Curry, adding RSA has anti-fraud technologies based on device identification, geolocation, and behavior profiling that can be combined with real-time fraud data from the RSA eFraud Network. Often used to access risk in banking systems today, this type of anti-fraud technology could also be used when embedded in mobile applications to identity high-risk and suspicious activities.

All of the partners supporting the “Secure by RSA Certified Mobile Partner program” have some project going to make use of RSA technologies in progress.

Good Technology, for instance, has agreed to integrate RSA mobile authentication into the Good Dynamics developer framework, the Good for Enterprise and Good for Government suites of business applications. FeedHenry, which has a software platform for common mobile application components for software developers, will also integrate RSA mobile authentication for use.

Zscaler and RSA say they have agreed to collaborate on an “identity aware” solution where mobile devices are first authenticated at the Zscaler Secure Web gateway using RSA mobile authentication technology. The idea is to allow minimal changes to be made to the device while enforcing security policy at the network layer, the two said today.

Citrix said it’s already embedded RSA mobile authentication into its mobile product Citrix Receiver, while Juniper and RSA said they have agreed to embed RSA mobile authentication technologies into the Juniper Networks Junos Pulse VPN.

Sanjay Beri, vice president and general manager at Juniper, said, “Through the integration of Junos Pulse and RSA, customers will have a unified point of access to both secure VPN and applications from their mobile devices, removing the burden for the end user or mobile applications to manage connectivity or authentication — ultimately making it seamless for the user to connect.”

Ellen Messmer is senior editor at Network World where she covers news and technology trends related to information security.

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