US carriers testing replacement for two-factor authentication
Major US cell phone carriers are working on a mobile authentication system that could create a new open standard. Under the banner of the Mobile Authentication Taskforce , AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon say they have a solution which could roll out before the end of the year: next-generation, multi-factor mobile authentication (hopefully they'll come up with a snappier name for it before launch), which is intended to provide better security than the two-factor authentication we've become accustomed to (and which is not without its flaws). The platform, powered by the carriers' networks, works by delivering a cryptographically verified phone number and profile data to authorized applications with the user's consent. Then it takes into account a whole bunch of other authenticating factors, such as a network verified number, IP address, SIM card attributes and phone account type, to make sure purchases and data usage is legit. Advanced analytics and machine l...