Under the terms of the agreement, Thales UK and Salt Group will jointly promote mobile authentication solutions using SafeSign, Thales' end-to-end authentication platform, and Salt Group Mobile Token authentication technology. This will enable organisations to offer convenient and cost-effective mobile phone based authentication capabilities to their customers.

Thales' SafeSign provides customers with a single, central authentication platform with the ability to authenticate users with different security and authentication requirements, ensuring that the most appropriate level of security is applied to transactions. SafeSign can authenticate users and transactions regardless of channel and for a range of identity solutions, including PKI certificates, smart cards, USB tokens, handheld tokens and biometrics.

An integral part of Salt Group's overall security offering, SafeSign can now authenticate transactions using any Salt Group Mobile Token, further increasing the solution's flexibility and offering customers a cost-effective route to comprehensive online security and fraud reduction. Thales' agreement with Salt Group means that companies can offer a mix of mobile phone based authentication mechanisms to their customers such as SMS authentication tokens, MCode - standalone cryptographically based one time password and challenge response tokens, or Salt Group's unique hybrid transaction authentication token, MSign.

"As a SafeSign reseller, we understand the importance of a single, highly trusted point of authentication within an enterprise and SafeSign's unique position in addressing this need," said Ross Oakley, Salt Group's CEO. "From the outset, we developed our Mobile Token solutions to be closely integrated with SafeSign and to leverage Thales' investment in this core infrastructure. We believe strongly that the ubiquity of mobile phones, together with our focus on low cost mobile token deployment, ease of integration into business applications and identity management systems, and simple end user operations provide SafeSign users a competitive, high assurance alternative, or complementary offering, to their existing user authentication mechanisms."

Salt Mobile Tokens have been designed and developed to break the nexus between high authentication assurance and token cost, and provide identity and transaction authentication assurance levels equivalent to purpose built authentication devices with a total cost of ownership more aligned to traditional single factor solutions. Salt's PIN protected Mobile Tokens have been designed for simple "over the air" high assurance provisioning and intuitive end user operation ensuring low help desk loads and near zero physical involvement in the fully integrated provisioning process.

James Kilazoglou, Managing Director of Thales e-Security, added: "The issue of identity management and authentication is becoming increasingly important, particularly as online transactions become ever more popular. Organisations such as banks, governments, pharmaceuticals and healthcare companies are faced with an array of different security risks. Thales' support of Salt Group Mobile Tokens shows our commitment to providing the widest range of transaction and identity management security solutions, and adds a significant capability to SafeSign's already comprehensive authentication token support."