Retail and Manufacturing

Computer workstations, personal computers and terminals are common in manufacturing shops, factory warehouses or sale floors today. However, as the use of information technology has accelerated so has the head-ache of securing these critical resources.. Some apparently simple operations, like logging off a computer, may grow into serious security issues without additional user training or the implementation of security systems that are failsafe when dealing with human behavior.

Although application vendors continuously improve user-friendliness and make their products more intuitive to use, authentication services and data security often remain outside their scope, thus become the weakest link of many enterprise solutions.

It's hard to expect that an average worker in a shop or a salesman will remember a complex password or will be able to manage changing it regularly. This often leads to the reduction in complexity of passwords, or sometimes even sharing a simple "1234 type" password among several users. Obviously, in such situations, the security value of the password is drastically reduced. Furthermore, the reality is that logon sessions are often left unlocked allowing any user to access the data without being forced to logon again. If the data in such a system are compromised, the cost of such "security" may become much more than anticipated.

MatchLogin enables Hardware ID tokens to be implemented in place of passwords thus significantly improving system security and providing a simple and relatively secure way for users to authenticate themselves. An "instant authorization" can be performed by using an RFID or a card-based ID token. Such cards are already widely used for physical access in many manufacturing and retail facilities and the exact same cards can now be re-used to secure logical access to corporate computers or networks, powered by MatchLogon.

In particular, in a manufacturing or retail environment, the MatchLogon solution provides the following capabilities:

• A simple way to control user access rights - an ID token identifies specific user account and rights;
• Intuitive, convenient and fast logon using an ID token;
• Data security - access to the network resources and specific roles can be associated with a certain ID or a group of IDs;
• Reliable automatic user switching - if a user with a different ID tries to access a terminal, MatchLogon will log-off the current user automatically before logging in the new user.
• In addition to the re-use of ID tokens, access to more sensitive systems with higher security requirements could be controlled by use of the ID token as a user name and fingerprint (or other biometric as a password).