Trust is simplified with V-Key

Smartphones are becoming increasingly ubiquitous in people’s lives, with 30% of the world's population owning a smartphone. Usage of mobile banking, mobile payments, mobile-capable government services,and mobile enterprise workforce enablement has grown rapidly. Current security measures comprise a mixture of hardware and SMS-based authentication, which present significant challenges. Clearly, there is a growing need for higher standards of mobile security, delivered for all mobile devices ubiquitously, along with a refinement of user experience across a wide range of user touch points and usage scenarios. V-Key’s pioneering products and services were created to meet these emerging challenges.

Salient features of V-Key

Secure Multi-Factor Authentication: Traditional security methods such as passwords are under increased stress due to online attacks and users’ continued usage of weak passwords or sharing of passwords across multiple online devices. As a result, banks and governments are looking to significantly increase their standards of mobile security.However, they do face a number of challenges such asHigh cost and inconvenience of Second-Factor Authentication (2FA) hardware tokens per customer, High cost and unreliability of one-time passwords sent via SMS, Cost,and unpredictability of physical distribution etc. In order to overcome these challenges, V-Key works to provide multi-factor authentication.

Protecting Payments:  Cloud-Based Payments make use of tokenized credit card keys and other fraud detection mechanisms to mitigate the security risks of a purely software-based mobile security approach. However, banks need to put in place additional mobile software security mechanisms to protect their mobile payments from cyber-attacks. 

Protecting identity and personal / application data: The world today is increasingly governed by digital transactions and data, and mobile payments are becoming more commonplace. Instances of data breaches, identity theft, and large-scale fraud are on the rise.V-Key’s technology is designed to address the multiple issues that banks, government agencies,and enterprises face with every transaction and every interaction. Thus identity protection and controlled use of data and attributes associated with identity and authentication are central to the company’s approach.

The security challenges and solutions

The company’s groundbreaking products offer banking and government-grade security, alongside convenience and ease of use for anyone with any level of familiarity with digital security systems. It works to secure the following sectors:

Government: The major challenge is to protect citizens' sensitive personal data. Effective security solutions must be the backbone of increasingly interconnected and complex ecosystems, to enable public and private sector agencies to act on real-time information and deliver improved services to citizens and businesses. The existing technology and security infrastructure are under increasing strain to meet the rising demands of smart citizens using smartphones to manage their daily transactions with government institutions and utility companies.The primary challenge for governments in this endeavor is to enable a single Know Your Customer (KYC) capability that can potentially be exposed via a secure API. This will allow government departments and ultimately businesses such as utilities to safely and seamlessly onboard and transact with citizens.

V-Key is at the forefront of solving some of the issues governments face in creating digital identities for a smart nation.New technologies such as V-OS Authentication Management, which is built on top of V-OS Virtual Secure Element improves smart chip security specifications and offers robust protection. The solution, which works on both iOS and Android devices, adds another layer of security for government organizations wishing to allow smartphone users to transact on-the-go, conveniently and with one secure application.  

Banking: Banks are increasingly moving towards a digital-first strategy. In executing their digital strategy, Heads of Digital Banking and Retail Banking must ensure that digital identity, mobile authentication, and authorization standards are constantly raised. They must continually provide the highest levels of security to their end users while maximizing user experience and minimizing cost. 

V-Key has developed the world’s first virtual secure element: V-OS, which matches or improves on the security characteristics of hardware, secure elements for cryptographic storage, processing,and verification of user credentials, and multi-factor authentication of transactions.V-OS has been subjectedto multiple rigorous penetration and stress tests by e-commerce players, government agencies, regulatory bodies and FinTech companies including Ant Financial Services Group.

Enterprise: An increasing number of employees are working remotely or frequently traveling for work purposes. More and more of them are bringing their own devices to work, and it’s now much easier for data to be transported across multiple devices and outside the physical office environment. Enterprises are constantly fighting to keep their sensitive data safe and prevent cyber-crime. 

V-Key can solve the security challenge in relation to access control at both the device and system levels, such as company-wide VPN. Multiple use cases can be secured in one app.  V-Key’s solutions can be integrated with existing hardware infrastructure and authentication servers.  In partnership with others, the company is able to provide security solutions for physical access to premises, security for VPN access, or security for Single Sign-On (SSO) for access to enterprise servers.   

Greet the leader

Joseph Gan, Co-founder, and President of V-Key: Joseph (formerly CTO and COO) is a digital security pioneer who holds multiple patents. Prior to founding V-Key, he was Lab Head at the Cryptography LabCentre for Strategic Infocomm Technologies (CSIT), R&D Manager at D’Crypt Pte Ltd, and IT Coordinating Officer for OCS Singapore Armed Forces. He designed the core technology which forms the basis for V-Key’s product suite.

“Our mission is to make possible a secure digital world where the mobile application is often the primary channel for mobile authentication, interaction, and transactions.”