Gartner Group’s 2012 Magic Quadrant for unique and innovative user authentication products features Equifax’s multifactor authentication product Anakam TFA Two Factor Authentication.

Gartner predicts that by 2017 more than 50% of enterprises will use cloud-based authentication services like Anakam, up from 10% today. 

The Mozilla Foundation has started testing its BrowserID user authentication system, a full six months after its introduction, ZDNet reports. Mozilla is testing the system across five of its sites.

BrowserID authenticates based on a user’s e-mail address rather than a username/password and third-party credentialing system. 

The Web Authorization Protocol (OAuth) has submitted OAuth 2.0, a framework for using security identity access tokens for native mobile application and API security, to the Internet Engineering Task Force’s (IETF) Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG), reports ZDNet.

The IESG put the framework into “In Last Call” status and has opened it up for comment until Feb. 6. 

Identity protection provider Yubico reported a successful 2011, with increased customer growth and revenue across geographical regions.

Yubico increased its customer base by 90% to 18,000 and won new clients, including government contractors, e-governments and cloud service providers. By the end of 2011, it had more than one million users in 100 countries. Additionally, customer and revenue growth increased across Yubico’s geographical segments, with 50% of its revenue now coming from the U.S. 

RSA Security executives spelled out the company’s product strategy for 2012, announcing that it would focus on mobile, anti-threat and cloud security.

As reported in Network World, RSA wants to develop tools that can help businesses improve data protection on mobile devices by separating personal and corporate data and improving mobile device authentication. RSA’s strategy includes adding more factor options to multi-factor authentication and embedding SecurID technology in mobile phones. 

With more and more transaction and interaction becoming electronic, privacy concerns are on the increase. This is especially true in the context of government-to-citizen and government-to-employee transactions.

The emergence of contactless technology as the preferred interface for smart card transactions is increasing the risk of data leakage. The result is that more personal data than ever before is being shared to create a web of information about who we are and what we do.

Some people believe that the information they are required to provide during a government transaction is excessive and irrelevant, especially as recent devices in the marketplace now make it easier than ever to capture sensitive details transmitted over-the-air and over-the-Internet. With so much personal information already available, questions are being asked as to how this information is stored, exchanged and used by the authorities. 

Entrust Inc. has made enhancements to its Entrust Discovery digital certificate product by expanding search capabilities for digital certificates residing within Microsoft’s Cryptographic APIs and adding more than 25 basic or custom policy field alerts to ease certificate management.

Entrust Discovery is a certificate management tool that locates, inventories and manages digital certificates. It can work across diverse systems and aims to prevent outages, data breach and non-compliance. Users can establish and customize policies for certificate management and can run hourly, daily, weekly or monthly scans to check certificates for their status.