Positive Networks Blog

After months of development and a couple of years of research and planning, I’m thrilled to announce that Positive Networks is readying its new two-factor authentication service, PhoneFactor, for launch this summer.

PhoneFactor is a phone-based two-factor authentication system. It works like this:

1. A user enters her normal username and password and logs in
2. Immediately, the system places a confirmation phone call to her pre-registered phone number
3. The user answers and presses # to confirm the login

You’ll notice that there are a few distinct advantages to this system. Most obviously, users don’t have to carry around Yet Another Device. IT departments don’t have to manage Yet Another Device (mailing them out, RMAing them, doing token synch, yada yada yada). And because it’s just a phone call, it works on literally any TouchTone phone in the world - you don’t need a smartphone, a J2ME environment, or anything of the kind.

One of the biggest advantages of PhoneFactor, however, is that it’s free. From the first day it launches, Positive Networks will be making the PHoneFactor service available for free to everyone. More details are available at www.phonefactor.net, but the basic idea is that Positive is going to sign up to providing the standard PhoneFactor service for free, permanently. If you have a VPN product (including, of course, PositivePRO), or a public-facing web application, or a Citrix server, or virtually any other kind of networked application, you can add PhoneFactor two-factor authentication to it for free. Positive will even pick up the tab for the outbound phone calls, as long as they’re to domestic US phone numbers.

The PhoneFactor service is a legitimate free service, in the mode of GMail or Flickr. We plan on keeping it free permanently. It’s not crippleware, adware, shareware, or any other kind of badware. It’s not a trial, and it’s not time-limited. It’s simply a free service.

Now, we also have to pay to keep the lights on, so we’re planning on selling add-on modules to PhoneFactor that we think will deliver even more value than the standard service. We’re also going to provide our world-class administrative and end-user support services and our advanced integration service for a fee. More about the add-ons can be learned at www.phonefactor.net. It’s my honest belief that the standard PhoneFactor service will provide a lot of value to a great many organizations without the add-ons, and will probably be all that most organizations need. But, if you’re a Fortune 500 company considering an enterprise-wide deployment, some of these modules will probably be of great benefit to you.

You can probably tell I’m pretty excited about this. It’s not every day that you get to go out and solve a real problem with cool new software, and to top it all off, I get what every coder wants: the chance for my software to be widely used and appreciated.

The precise launch date isn’t fixed yet, but I expect to hear fireworks when we release it, if ya know what I mean.

There is a ton of additional information over at www.phonefactor.net, including a particularly fine white paper by yours truly. You can also sign up for the mailing list to be notified when we release.