The deal with a heavyweight like Mountain View, California-based VeriSign is clearly a huge fillip for the developer based in Toronto and traded on the OTC market of the Toronto Stock Exchange.
While the deal raises Diversinet’s profile considerably, for VeriSign it represents the opportunity to take strong authentication based on the OATH alliance to the now increasingly ubiquitous mobile handset ahead of arch-rival RSA Security Inc.
We’ve been doing some co-marketing with VeriSign around their Unified Authentication offering and no they’re going to be baking out software token technology into their solution set, said Charles Walton, executive VP of corporate development for Diversinet.
He added that VeriSign would in fact be offering the technology in a variety of form factors, including smart cards, hardware tokens and, most importantly from a distribution point of view, software tokens for phones.
Some enterprises may like hardware tokens, but for the more extended corporations such as banks, token management is a complex issue when they have thousands of customers, Walton said.
The Diversinet product going onto phones is the MobiSecure Software Token, to which is tied a credential and a key, such that subscribers can click on the application and enter a PIN number, which generates a one-time password for use at a kiosk or home PC to carry out a transaction.
The token can also be used for remote log-kin by corporate employees, replacing the RSA SecurID token, Walton added.
Diversinet also produces a Software Multi-Token, so that multiple trust issuers such as AOL, banks and so on can all be accessed from a single token, with the particular icon clicked on dictating which relationship is invoked for the transaction.
At the network side, VeriSign will be using Diversinet’s MobiSecure Authentication Service Center (MASC), which mints the tokens, provisions them to phones over the air or through a cradle and carried out their lifecycle management, i.e. handling scenarios such as phone loss, forgotten PIN, upgrades and so on. VeriSign will add on its own validation technology.
Walton had no information about pricing for the service, which he said VeriSign would announce later this year.
