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Maybe old Benny had authentication in mind when he wrote this (paraphrased) quote.

Surely this is a great truth that we do understand well in Stonesoft, since we always kept focus and attention on usability of our solutions. Our legendary SMC ease of use is a proof of that, and another is SMS based authentication featured by StoneGate SSL VPN.

Recent cloud computing mega trend raised again concerns for authentication tied to access to the cloud, and many blog posts and discussion are undergoing about what are best methods to ensure strong enough, yet easy to achieve and use authentication method.

One time passwords seems to be a good idea, but implementation often made it too complicated because relying on hardware devices, software to install on hardware devices, PIN to remember, etc.

Few years ago, Finland made a nice technological gift to the world with first text message sent from a cell phone to another by a student staging at Nokia, and since then the situation evolved to 4.1 trillion of messages sent in year 2008. This indicates clearly that:

• mobile phones are quite popular
• we always keep them with us (and return home if we leave them there)
• SMS is a widely used technology, no matter which type of mobile phone we have

As stated in a previous post, StoneGate SSL VPN can be used to implement text messaging based authentication with OTP and… my Nokia proves it here below

Network Security. Simplified!

written by RoarinPenguin - 972 views \\ tags: authentication, sms, SSL VPN, stonegate, text messaging

The SMC provide users with a sophisticate alert system and a wide varieties of notification media. Most of them relay on standard Internet servers, like the email service. The only exception is the SMS notification that relay on external hardware.

So far Stonesoft has tested and validate the Wavecom Fastrack M1306B. Since it has reached the end-of-life state we have started to test the replacing model: Wavecom Fastrack Supreme 20. Even though the 2 devices look quite similar, after initial tests with SMC 4.3.x we can say that the new SMS modem is not compatible with SMC. Most likely we are going to fix the problem in next release, just do not rush on the new model. By the way if you wish to test another device it is the right time to speak up: simply add a comment to this post explaining your reasons.

written by maurob - 1,317 views \\ tags: Alert Escalation, modem, sms