New study suggests smart card adoption on the rise

According to a recent study by the Aberdeen Group, the RSA SecureID breach in which hackers penetrated the defenses of Lockheed Martin and L-3 has helped fuel the industry move to adopt smart cards as a result of the attack. The study was commissioned by ActivIdentity and revealed the data breach as the main driver for the shift to smart card technology, which offers several benefits.

The new study outlines how smart cards offer organizations multi-purpose capabilities, increased vendor-integration and support for "certificate authorities, hardware security modules and integration of card-based authentication with applications, networks, endpoints, servers, [and] physical access management systems," the company said in a press release. Other benefits from smart cards are their flexibility of deployments.

With traditional security measures, such as username and password methods, organizations may find themselves with a weak defense infrastructure. According to the study, standard methods are risky and may compromise such systems.

"Recent technological improvements make smart cards more accessible to a broader market, especially small- and medium-sized organizations," said Derek Brink, vice president and research fellow for IT Security at Aberdeen Group. "The RSA breach and other related news headlines are raising industry awareness of the risks associated with failure to use the most up-to-date two-factor authentication methods at the very least."

To combat these potential security risks, ActivIdentity released three steps organizations can utilize to protect from dangerous threats. According to its report, although certain defenses cannot protect a company from every attack, smart cards provide the most logical and affordable solution through multi-layered authentication requirements. Companies should also establish one-time-password tokens with multiple variables, as well as "protect OTP token seed files with strong encryption and initialize tokens and smart card keys locally."

Worldwide, the market for smart cards is expected to increase significantly in the future as more organizations turn to the technology for improved security measures. According to a study by RNCOS, global shipments of smart cards are projected to increase at an annual compound growth rate of approximately 24 percent from 2011 to 2013. The driving force behind the growth of the technology is the eventual roll out of near field communications, while other factors, such as the rapid adoption of mobile and phone payments, are also contributors.