Imprivata Announces PhoneFactor Partnership

Imprivata customers have long been using multiple authentication modalities, enabling users to authenticate in the most convenient way in any given situation. A user might use biometrics on his laptop, a proximity card when walking around the hospital or a Vasco token when logging in from home.

Today, a new partnership with PhoneFactor has been announced, offering a new way of authenticating to complement the broad range of existing authentication modalities supported by Imprivata OneSign and OneSign Anywhere.

PhoneFactor is two-factor authentication working out-of-band, and requiring nothing but a regular phone.

Here’s how it works: you login to OneSign or OneSign Anywhere and provide your username and password, this is something you know (a.k.a. first factor). OneSign will then contact the PhoneFactor cloud service, which will immediately call your phone. Answering the phone and pressing the pound key is all it takes to acknowledge that you accept the authentication with something you have (a.k.a. second factor). For more stringent security the administrator can also configure the system to require that you enter a pin.

This is an easy and convenient way for users to authenticate, and it’s even easier for the administrator. All that is needed is to register the users’ phone numbers in the PhoneFactor system, and they are all set. There’s no software to install or support at the client or on the phone. There’s no device to send to the user and nothing to replace because something broke or got lost.

PhoneFactor is a great way to authenticate to Imprivata OneSign Anywhere, which provides secure remote access and single sign-on to web applications and hosted applications. OneSign Anywhere enables users to access their applications and data from a number of devices including iPads and iPhones - so it makes a lot of sense to use the mobile phone that you were carrying anyway as your second factor. In fact, here’s a quick demo of me using OneSign Anywhere, my iPad and PhoneFactor for authentication:

PhoneFactor is also supported with OneSign and can be used for authentication to workstations and for transaction-level authentication with ProveId - this is ideal, for example, if a doctor needs to sign a prescription on the road within a hosted desktop, but also serves on-premise as a backup for biometric or proximity card access.

You can find more detail on OneSign Anywhere in this blog post and in the OneSign Anywhere demo video.