User authentication SDK for e-commerce portals

The online shopping trend is growing by leaps and bounds. At the same time, e-commerce portals for managing customers and employee extranets are gaining increasing importance. Although online shopping has not yet reached the same levels in Europe as it has in other countries—for example South Korea, where around 90% of all PC users have already shopped on the Internet—it has become an integral part of our lives here, too. However, in the long term, providers of such websites will no longer be able to make do with simple static passwords for user login to ensure the safety of their online portals.

The Savernova software development kit offers these portals a solution for secure user authentication. The SDK replaces the static password login with a secure one-time-password method, which provides additional protection by generating a new password for every login. The authentication system defines a new starting point on the password card for every login, from which the user-defined reading path is then followed.

The SDK takes a very small amount of programming to implement as it requires very few changes to the existing environment. Each active user is stored in encrypted form, along with his or her password and secret reading path, in either the current database or a separate database set up specifically for that purpose.

The password card technology generates strong passwords which meet all four security criteria (upper- and lower-case letters, special characters and digits), ensuring maximum security. The user automatically generates long, complex and therefore strong passwords without the worry of remembering them. All the user has to remember is his or her secret reading path to use each time. The reading path is essentially a pattern enabling the user to generate passwords from a system-defined starting point on the password card generating strong passwords.