One could not help but hear the recent news about celebrity accounts on Apple iCloud being hacked. This resulted in the private images of well-known celebrities being spread across the internetpretty much appalling to all of us. While the internet has become so integral to our everyday lives, it still harbors risks that may potentially be very damaging to our well-being. That is why New Jersey entrepreneur Adnan Qadeer of AllWeb Technologies Inc. feels so strongly about his company’s new technology that provides a solution to this serious ongoing security challenge.
AllWeb champions two-factor or two-step authentication to prevent security breaches such as the one that occurred on Google cloud. The company recently launched “Identity Manager” called AllWebID which they feel would have prevented the celebrity account breach. The AllWeb service uses a set of biometric factors that add an extra layer of security over the commonly used user/password login process. It currently uses fingerprint identification and in the future will offer other biometrics for their customers to choose.
Tech entrepreneur Qadeer explains the factors around another recent passwords leak, “The 5 million passwords that were recently leaked on the web are all associated with Gmail addresses. These username and password combinations could be used not just for Gmail accounts, but also for other web services such as LinkedIn that have also been hacked in the past. The web services currently allow access to personal data based on the simple principle that whoever enters the right combination of username and password must be the true authorized user. The absence of an additional authentication step establishing the true identity of the individual entering the passwords is absentthis creates the vulnerability for the intrusion.”
Qadeer contends that the use of identity authentication can be easily accomplished by linking the passwords with a personal identifier for the user such as a cell phone or their fingerprint. The additional requirement of the user’s fingerprint or cell phone truly makes stolen passwords useless, thereby eliminating potential threats to various web services such as Linkedin, Google, iCloud and others.
The recently launched AllWebID is the end result of four years of hard work for the NJIT EDC incubator based company. The service is now available to businesses for their web services. Currently it uses fingerprint identification, but it will soon offer multiple choices to their users such as one time use pin codes texted to their cell phones.
Qadeer feels the launch of their product is most timely, given the recent highly publicized security breach that has captured the public’s attention. Businesses can easily sign up on the AllWebID.com website to create an account and download the SDK for adding identity authentication. Their fee structure is based on the business solution, not the end user or consumer.
The AllWebID platform is targeted for enterprise use, offering ease of integration with the enterprise login workflow; the ability of administrators to provision large numbers of accounts quickly; while providing scalability, security and reliability. With these capabilities in place the financial services and healthcare industries are an immediate fit for AllWeb’s service. Ecommerce and some government segments are also customer targets.
