SafeNet has announced that they have entered into an agreement to offer SafeNet smart cards and PKI hard tokens for cryptographic storage of PKI credentials. 

As part of its multifactor authentication program, Internet2’s InCommon will offer SafeNet’s smart cards and PKI tokens to participating higher education organizations. These devices provide researchers, faculty, students and staff with secure, cryptographic storage of the client certificates that they may use to access campus-based and online resources secured with PKI, as well as allowing for S/MIME digital email signatures and email encryption. 

SafeNet will serve as one of the preferred vendors of security technology, providing InCommon Affiliate and Federation programs with two-factor authentication devices that enable highly secure, certificate-based access to online and local network resources. Use of hard tokens or smart cards can be helpful if users are working on a shared machine in a campus computer lab or want to use the same cryptographic credentials on multiple devices, such as on a desktop at work and a laptop at home.

InCommon serves the U.S. education and research communities, supporting a common framework of trust, including the U.S. identity management trust federation for research and education, a community-driven Certificate Service, an Assurance Program for higher levels of trust, and a multifactor authentication program. 

The more than 400 InCommon participants include colleges, universities, research organizations, U.S. government agencies, and their sponsored partners. 

Chen Arbel, Director of Business Development at SafeNet stated that as they continue to see an exponential growth of digital data assets, ensuring secure access becomes increasingly critical for security. It is essential to make certain  that users are who they say they are and that they can only access what they have been authorized to access. They believe two-factor authentication, backed by PKI as the root of trust, is the best way to secure these digital assets. 

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