Campus Security

Unicon Partners with Vasco on Higher Ed Data Security

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 04/09/10

Two companies have teamed up to sell two-factor authentication tools into the higher education market. Unicon, an IT consulting services provider that specializes in open source for the education market, has begun selling software developed by Vasco Data Security, which specializes in creating strong authentication and e-signature applications for the financial sector, enterprise security, e-commerce, and e-government.

Vasco's two-factor authentication programs replace personal passwords with constantly changing passwords that can't be reused at the next login. This practice reduces the risk of a user falling victim to phishing scams, keylogger viruses, and plain password theft. Two-factor authentication requires the user to provide at least two pieces of information in order to gain access to services.

"Vasco Data Security is great for the industry and will benefit institutions by providing security for the online campus," said John Blakley, CEO of Unicon. "Unicon specializes in authentication solutions, and working with Vasco will allow us to help our customers meet their institution's increasing concerns surrounding identity management."

Unicon also recently announced support for Shibboleth to provide secure, federated, single sign-on authentication for enterprise applications and platforms. This open source project provides a trusted way for an application to authenticate a user from inside or outside the organization. Shibboleth is a project of the Internet2 Middleware Initiative. All development work and fixes performed by the team for individual institutions are contributed back and shared with the Shibboleth community.