Han Dong, Senior Product Marketing Manager, User Authentication

One great thing about blogging for a company like VeriSign, which happens to have so many cool tools in its bag, is that it's so easy to find several blogs on the net that mention you. And in this case I'm referring to a Wall Street Journal blog: "Under Surveillance: Big Brother Stocks", by James Altucher. In this blog, Altucher talks about all of the various measures (and money spent - to the tune of $200 billion in the U.S.) taken to automate the monitoring and protection of your banking transactions, checking in at the airport, and even your simple ATM cash...

Han Dong, Senior Product Marketing Manager, User Authentication

It's a good thing that people much smarter than me are thinking about the future of the internet, cloud computing, and ensuring I'm properly indoctrinated on the right social networking sites du jour. More importantly, these same smart people are constantly thinking about really critical things, like 'standards', 'interoperability', and 'security'. Guys like Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Web and HTML, Paul Mockapetris, the inventor of DNS, and Vinton Cerf, the father of the internet and co-designer of TCP/IP, are constantly analyzing what's happening today and thinking about what's coming in the future. These people are part of the founding fathers of the web, the internet, and how all the intricate pieces work together seamlessly -...

Han Dong, Senior Product Marketing Manager, User Authentication

I just read an article in CNET, by Jonathan Eunice, Character limitations in passwords considered harmful. And immediately after reading the story I thought to myself, Jonathan (may I call you Jonathan), we have the answer to your troubles. It's called VeriSign Identity Protection (VIP) Authentication Service and it's precisely what you need to address your goal to have strong authentication for your "4,000 web services."

Jonathan's article described the issue of how various websites will frequently restrict your ability to create 'stronger' passwords that use symbols (i.e. !@#$%^&), and thus relegate the user to simple (and easy to steal) phrase or nickname passwords. So he is thwarted from his...

Concerns for the security of application run in the cloud are running high. The perceived lack of security of cloud platforms is often cited as the primary obstacle to adoption. Whether "cloud" is defined as infrastructure as a service (storage and compute services ala Amazon), platform as a service (application deployment environment ala Google App Engine), or simply as application outsourcing (SAAS ala SuccessFactor), almost everyone is lamenting at the security inadequacies of these new computing platforms.

This raises the question whether cloud providers should envision becoming security companies. After all, why would CIOs ever shift their entire IT infrastructure to the cloud unless the cloud came with strong security, compliance assurance and operational risk management? Conversely, should security companies rapidly transform themselves into cloud providers? After all, why would an enterprise that has crossed the Rubicon of moving the IT infrastructure to the cloud...