Two-factor authentication and certificates

How they work

Certificates are typically used in conjunction with USB tokens or smart cards but can be implemented separately. A certificate is assigned to a user, a token or a particular machine and is read during the authentication process. Certificates are much more secure than they were a few years ago due to better encryption and more robust certificate stores.

Pros and cons

Certificates tend to be a stronger style of authentication, but come at a much higher cost. The infrastructure typically required in an enterprise (servers, hierarchical certificate server domain deployment and personnel) is pricey to set up and maintain. Third-party vendor-managed services help, but this authentication is still more expensive than most others reviewed here.

What to do

Organizations with extremely high security requirements, such as government agencies handling classified information, will want to consider certificates. Today, there are discrete pockets of certificate implementations, but with the increasing dep

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loyment of USB tokens and TPM chips, this sector is expected to grow over the next decade to become nearly ubiquitous.