AuthAnvil | Passwords Perfected

	Protecting Apps with Custom Authentication
	Embedding strong authentication into existing applications provides a mechanism to reduce risk to confidential resources by offering identity assurance for those people needing to use these applications. Take advantage of AuthAnvil’s web services architecture to provide two-factor authentication directly into your own software, and reuse your existing AuthAnvil infrastructure that is already protecting the rest of your business.
	Why Add AuthAnvil Support To Your Applications?
	Many companies leverage in-house developed applications to meet objectives in their business workflow. These tools and applications typically have a great deal of access to confidential information and are normally protected with built in password systems which may be inadequate to protect the data. Adding stronger authentication solutions hasn’t been easily available for custom applications. They are usually too complex and require serious overhauling of the code to integrate. Not anymore.

	AuthAnvil supports both a COM interface and a web services interface which makes it extremely easy to add strong authentication support in just a few lines of code. If your in-house application is developed in Visual Studio, you can use the built in tools to import “Web References” and immediately gain access to the AuthAnvil Web Service. This lets you reuse your existing AuthAnvil infrastructure that is already protecting the rest of your business within your own code.
	AuthAnvil Strong Authentication
	AuthAnvil uses one-time passwords (OTP) that are dynamically generated by portable hardware authentication tokens. Combined with an easy to remember PIN, these two pieces of information create a strong passcode that cannot be reproduced. And can only be used once. This is what makes up two-factor authentication. It is something you know (your unique PIN) and something you have (your OTP).
	How It Works
	Under the hood, the core of AuthAnvil is driven by a Web Service. A web service is a software system designed to support interoperable Machine to Machine interaction over a network. Using an XML-based extensible message envelope, a client wishing to consume strong authentication provided by AuthAnvil can send a request to the AuthAnvil server for authentication. Once validated, AuthAnvil will return an envelope which contains information granting or revoking the request. For developers who do not know how to use web services or cannot use a language that readily supports it, a COM interface is available that can be called directly. This interface converts the COM request into a web service request and completes the transaction on behalf of the caller.
	Prerequisites
	To add AuthAnvil strong authentication support to protected web applications in IIS the following prerequisites are needed: A programming language that can consume Web Services and supports SOAP/XML. Network access to an AuthAnvil SAS AuthAnvil Authentication Tokens AuthAnvil DCOM Bridge (optional for COM object access)
	Key Highlights
	Some highlights to the Custom Authentication solution include: Identity assurance that proves that the user attempting to logon is who they say they are. Leverages your existing investment into Microsoft technology to deliver enterprise level security at a fraction of the price. Easily accessible with Microsoft’s Visual Studio IDE. Supports authentication directly through web services or indirectly through a COM interface.