SCHUFA, a German credit reporting agency, has issued more than 1 million grid cards from Entrust for multi-factor authentication to its consumer portal. SCHUFA and its customers rely on the Entrust IdentityGuard authentication platform and Entrust’s grid cards.

Entrust IdentityGuard provides users with a grid-based encryption table the size of a credit card. Printed on the card is a coordinate system of letters and numbers, which are designed individually for each account holder.

At the login process, the security server provides two coordinates. The customer responds with the code in the appropriate field located on their unique grid card.

Entrust IdentityGuard provides a number of mobile identification solutions, such as soft tokens, smart cards or USB devices, but also provides systems that use a second channel of information, including one-time passcodes by voice, SMS or email.

In addition, printed and electronic grid cards are used, as well as hardware tokens and digital certificates. This makes customized strong authentication approaches possible, which take account of individual threats, user needs and the level of data confidentiality required.