John Pescatore

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John Pescatore
VP Distinguished Analyst
11 years at Gartner
32 years IT industry

John Pescatore is a vice president and research fellow in Gartner Research. Mr. Pescatore has 32 years of experience in computer, network and information security. Prior to joining Gartner, Mr. Pescatore was senior consultant for Entrust Technologies and Trusted Information Systems… Read Full Bio

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Twelve Word Tuesday: Google Announces Support for The Universal Token

by John Pescatore  |  September 21, 2010  |  3 Comments

Cellphones:  the only authentication token that isn’t “yet another thing to carry.”

Google adds support for strong authentication using challenge/response over mobile messaging.

3 Comments »

Category: Security     Tags:

3 responses so far ↓

  • 1 Scott Olson   September 21, 2010 at 9:57 am

    Clearly mobile phones are the future of multi-factor authentication.

  • 2 John Pescatore   September 22, 2010 at 9:41 am

    In many cases, they are the *present* – they’ve been in use, and effective, in many applications for a while now.

    As Avivah Litan points out in her blog post, two factor challenge/response is not perfect – but nothing is, and in real world business no one needs to wait for perfect security. The real world is all about making advances to keep fraud to acceptable business levels, not ever getting to zero.

  • 3 The Future of Passwords: Put All Your Eggs in One Basket (And Really, Really Watch That Basket) or Stop Using Eggshells as the Foundation of E-Commerce?   December 17, 2010 at 7:59 am

    [...] Gawker incident increase momentum for alternatives to the reusable password, like the simple use of text messaging for challenge/response or other approaches.  Just as it is time for DNSSEC to increase the security of identifying [...]

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