In view of the vulnerabilities of static, reusable passwords and in order to limit the risk of unauthorized access, methods are available that greatly increase security through the use of variable passwords, solutions where passwords are only valid for a single login. In such case, even capturing or knowing the password will be meaningless as it can only be used once.

The vast majority of variable password solutions involve the use of some kind of physical device, such as tokens, USB flash drives, etc. that will generate all or part of these passwords. Most of these devices generate a new numeric passcode every 60 seconds that is used, together with a user's PIN code, to create a variable password. This is generally referred to as two-factor authentication.

Draw-backs of hardware based solutions
Although device based solutions may be secure, they have significant draw-backs. As with any physical object, the user can forget the device or the device can get lost, stolen or rendered inoperable by abuse or accident. If this should happen to a user who needs to access protected information resources from an insecure environment, that can pose a serious problem and potentially a major security risk.

In addition, these solutions require back-end systems to manage the devices and will also significantly increase help desk requirements. And last, but certainly not least, the cost of the tokens themselves and the systems to manage them can make these solutions prohibitively expensive, especially for organizations with large numbers of online users, such as financial institutions.

Need for simple solution
What is needed therefore is a method for enabling secure authentication that is cost-effective, user-friendly, easy to implement and that requires no physical devices, no extra computational power and no mathematical or other data manipulation on the part of the user.

That solution is OTPXS™