SAFE-BioPharma issues cybersecurity best practices
24 October, 2016
category: Corporate, Digital ID, Government, Health
The health care and pharmaceutical markets are ripe targets for hackers. Secure, standardized credentials are one step companies can take to try and alleviate data breaches.
SAFE-BioPharma Association has issued new guidelines addressing cyber-identity authentication and uses of digital signatures. SAFE-BioPharma also has debuted a brief animated video explaining authentication and digital signatures within the life sciences.
The guidelines describe SAFE-BioPharma Association guidance concerning authentication credentials and digital signatures. This guidance, while primarily intended for the SAFE-BioPharma community, is considered applicable to the broader life sciences and health care areas as they move towards expanded online implementations.
The SAFE-BioPharma standard assures trust in compliant digital identity credentials. The standard calls for a credential that is closely bound to the proven identity of each individual using the credential.
These credentials are trusted to represent their users among a broad network of government, corporate, and other entities including all U.S. federal agencies and the European Medicines Agency. Digital signatures applied using these credentials are used for regulatory submissions to the FDA and European Medicines Agency and are required by the U.S. DEA for electronically signing prescriptions for controlled substances.
Among the many advantages of identity credentials compliant with the SAFE-BioPharma standard is the substitution of a single cyber-credential for the outdated multitude of less secure user name and password combinations.
