Nok Nok Labs Announces Support for Trusted User Interface to Enable Secure Mobile Payments

PALO ALTO, Calif., Oct. 1, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- Nok Nok Labs, an innovator in modern authentication and a founding member of the FIDO Alliance, today announced the addition of Trusted User Interface (Trusted UI) capability to the FIDO-Ready NNL^TM S3 Authentication Suite. This new solution, delivered with Trustonic's ARM TrustZone-based Trusted Execution Environment (TEE), provides strong security across mobile payments, m-commerce and the entire payments ecosystem, by ensuring that all user authentication and transaction verification can be isolated from the Rich OS, increasing protection against malware attacks and providing strong consumer protection.

The industry standards group, Global Platform, defines a Trusted UI as a 'specific mode in which a mobile device is controlled by the TEE, enabling it to check that the information displayed on the screen comes from an approved trusted application (TA) and is isolated from the rich OS'. Global Platform standardized this capability in December 2013, with its Trusted User Interface API v1.0.

The Trusted UI functionality, which is leveraged in the FIDO specifications to support Transaction Confirmation, enables Nok Nok Labs to deliver stronger end-to-end security. Service providers can use the Nok Nok solution to deliver better security assurances to their customers and to provide them with more secure online transactions. Trusted UI supports the implementation of a secure pin pad for devices where no biometric verification methods are present, it also prevents Man-in-the-Browser (MITB) attacks by implementing the FIDO authenticator using this secure pin pad and transaction confirmation display. Trusted UI ensures that only actual users and not malware can enter the PIN. The user sees the transaction and has to approve it, so 'what you see is what you sign' – the content of the signed message cannot be changed.

"Consumers can already replace passwords with fingerprint authentication on smartphones and tablets which utilize standards-based specifications such as FIDO," said Rob Coombs, security marketing director, ARM.  "Nok Nok Labs' inclusion of a trusted user interface based on ARM TrustZone technology brings advanced hardware-based security to FIDO implementations, offering increased confidence to consumers and cloud service providers. It will help to accelerate the move to simpler, stronger authentication for everyone."

"The addition of Trusted UI to our authentication security solution is an important building block in protecting user authentication against mobile malware attacks," said Rajiv Dholakia, vice president of Products, Nok Nok Labs. "With the increased use of mobile banking applications, this is particularly beneficial for the financial and payments sector. This industry sees extremely high-value and highly-sensitive transactions, and we recognized the importance of providing an even greater level of security to our customers so they could in turn confidently assure their users that their data is safe and secure."

Rolf Lindemann, Senior Director, Products & Technology at Nok Nok Labs, will lead a session on the Trusted UI and its role is protecting against malware attacks at ARM TechCon on Thursday, October 2^nd at 2:30pm PT. His session will provide attendees with a clear understanding of how the ARM TrustZone Trusted UI and the FIDO protocol jointly support authentication and transaction verification for mobile payments. Nok Nok Labs will also be demonstrating this capability at the ARM booth at the event.

About Nok Nok Labs

Nok Nok Labs, Inc., based in Palo Alto, CA, was founded to transform online authentication for modern computing. The company is backed by a team of security industry veterans from PGP, Netscape, Oracle, PayPal and Phoenix that have deep experience in building Internet scale security protocols and products.  The company's solutions enable end-to-end trust across the web using authentication methods that are natural to end-users and provide strong proof of identity.  For more information, visit www.noknok.com.

CONTACT: Merritt Group, 703-856-2218, [email protected]

SOURCE Nok Nok Labs