Exostar and SAFE-BioPharma Association announced a partnership that will enable Exostar to issue non-public key infrastructure identity credentials.

Gemalto announced that its LinqUs Mobile ID platform is compliant with the GSMA Mobile Connect initiative and is available for commercial launch; HID Global revealed that the newly designed Irish electronic passport won the Regional ID Document of the Year Award 2014 at the annual High Security Printing Conference in Milan; and LEGIC signed two new license contracts in Eastern Europe: EDPS in Poland and Prosoft-Systems in Russia.

Passwords are the cockroaches of the authentication and identity world, annoying, dirty and ever present. But will they die? Passwords will remain a factor of authentication but the outdated modality will lessen as time goes on and as other systems emerge to better secure systems and devices.

Veridu wants to make the consumer authentication process as painless as possible for the consumer and retailer by using a system that looks at the overall quality and depth of the consumer’s online footprint and generates a score on the credibility of the consumer’s identity.

BYOD challenges enterprises with two stark realties, first, they need to be readying their workforces to use mobile devices and they must make sure that they are able to provide a level of security for mobile devices that matches the level found on the desktop.

Gemalto’s Protiva Cloud Confirm is compatible with HP CloudSystem under the HP Helion cloud portfolio; FIME extended its ISO quality assurance accreditation under ISO17025; the Open Standard for Public Transport Alliance revealed that São Paulo Transporte and Swiss Post Solutions will utilize its CIPURSE standard; and Ram Shriram, a founding board member of Google and former executive at Amazon.com, has joined strong authentication specialist Yubico

With sales of tablets and smart phones on the rise — 2.2 billion in 2014 — hackers are switching their focus to target the mobile devices in order to gain access to personal information. Gartner has some suggestions on how enterprises can be protected from these attacks.

Toopher is touting invisible authentication but also may have one of the coolest tag lines for an identity company out there: “cool enough for James Bond and your mom can use it too.” Once an enterprise enables a site for Toopher, a user’s mobile device can serve as a second factor of authentication.

In the wake of Heartbleed, organizations are asking what they should do to protect employees and clients from damage the bug may have caused. Here are some best ways to deal with those issues, in addition to how to protect both company data and employee privacy moving forward.

Organizations can easily add security to their login procedures with two-factor authentication, which is a simple process that requires users to enter more than one piece of information to access accounts. For example, in addition to simply entering a user name and password, two-factor authentication requires use of another identifier, such as a smart card or a PIN code.