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June - 2015 - issue > In My Opinion

Public Key Infrastructure - Enabling a Secure Digital Environment

By Philippe Inserra, Vice President - Authentication, Gemalto
Tuesday, June 9, 2015
By Philippe Inserra, Vice President - Authentication, Gemalto
Headquartered in Amsterdam, Netherlands, GEMALTO (GTO.PA) is an international digital security company providing software applications, secure personal devices.

According to the recent Breach Level Index (BLI) by SafeNet, 1,500 data breaches occurred worldwide in 2014, leading to one billion compromised data records. 2014 also saw a sharp rise in data breaches (49 percent) and data records that were either stolen or lost (78 percent) as compared to 2013.

What's more, as cyber criminals become increasingly sophisticated in their attacks, there is a shift in their tactics with long-term identity theft becoming more important than the immediacy of stealing a credit card number. The main motivation for cyber criminals in 2014 was identity theft which surpassed any breach category including access to financial data.

With this, governments, enterprises, financial institutions as well as individuals need to be increasingly vigilant to protect identities. They need to supplement their current security mechanisms such as strong passwords with two factor authentication or multi-factor authentication systems.

Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) technology is one of the highest levels of security available today and can be used in combination with various other security mechanisms such as biometrics, strong passwords or One Time Passwords (OTP) among others.


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