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‘Physical Tokens’ vs ‘Onetime Password Messaging’


Question: Which proposition do you think is better as the second factor of 2-factor authentications?

Answer: All depend on where you see the better balance between security and convenience for each use case.

We could see a merit of physical tokens or hardware keys as against OTP messaging that is relatively more vulnerable in the online environment, but we could also see its demerit ; When we have dozens of accounts to protect, would we have to carry around a big bunch of hardware keys which could physically catch a quick eye of bad guys or would we have to re-use one or a few hardware keys across many accounts, physically creating a single point of failure?

In order to overcome this conflict, we came up with our own proposition of 2-channel/2-factor authentication for achieving an optimal balance between security and convenience at a higher level, which was implemented for a corporate network 6 years ago and is still running.

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