This slide deck discusses the emerging of MFA, the pitfalls, why you should upgrade your MFA and best possible alternatives for MFA. Watch the webinar here - https://wso2.com/library/webinars/2019/02/why-upgrade-your-mfa-to-adaptive-authentication/

1. Adaptive Authentication
Why upgrade your MFA to AA?
Isura Karunaratne, Associate Technical Lead - WSO2
Nilasini Thirunavukkarasu, Software Engineer - WSO2

2. WSO2 At-A-Glance
Colombo, London,
Mountain View, New York,
São Paulo, Sydney
Founded 2005,
Backed by Cisco and Toba
Capital
500+ Employees
(300 Engineers)
Open Source
525+ Customers,
100+ New Customers in 2018
53% YoY growth

3. Single Factor Authentication

4. Multi Factor
Authentication(MFA)

6. Convenience
Security

7. Multi Factor Authentication(MFA)
Basic Authentication SMS OTP
Authentication
Authenticated

8. Purpose, Needs, and Motivations for
MFA
● Security
○ The strength of authentication systems are largely determined by the number of factors or
layers incorporated into the system.
● Compliance
○ Almost every organization has some level of local, state, and/or federal compliance to
which they must adhere.

9. Multi factor Authentication Benefits
● Improve Security
● Achieve Compliance

10. Challenges With Legacy MFA

11. Challenges With Legacy MFA
● Usability
● Cost
● Backup options
● People just don’t use MFA
● Inherent security vulnerabilities in MFA mechanisms
● Authentication can’t be one-size-fits-all anymore
● Extensive authentication mechanisms affect productivity

12. Adaptive Authentication

13. Convenience Security

14. ● Request/environment factors
● User attributes and roles
● Level of assurance required
● User behavior
● Decisions from analytics/machine learning
● And many more...
Adaptive authentication based on...

15. How Adaptive Authentication
Overcomes challenges in MFA

16. Diminish the Imbalance Between
Security and User Experience
• Requires a change in the UI of the application which we are
trying to secure
• A user enter the second factor to the system only if the risk
evaluation has decided so

17. Improved Security
• Authenticating in certain geo-locations, authenticating via a
network which shows suspicious activity, high profile online
transactions

18. Flexibility to Meet Corporate and User
Needs
• Apply diverse and different authentication methods to unique
use cases

19. Improved Productivity
• Improve productivity by stepping down authentication
requirements in low-risk situations

20. Demo

21. ● 4 Reasons to Upgrade Your MFA to Adaptive Authentication:
https://wso2.com/library/article/2018/10/4-reasons-to-upgrade-your-
mfa-to-adaptive-authentication/
● [White paper] Keep calm and authenticate: Why adaptive is the
next big thing
https://wso2.com/whitepapers/keep-calm-and-authenticate-why-adap
tive-is-the-next-best-thing/
References

22. Upcoming Webinar
“The Future of Digital IAM”
On Wednesday, February 27, 2019
Register at -
https://wso2.com/library/webinars/2019/02/the-fu
ture-of-digital-iam/

23. Q & A

24. THANK YOU
wso2.com