myhealth cardThis week the public pilot of the healthcare portal myhealth.sg launched in Singapore, enabling individuals to manage their health, nutrition, and fitness information online. I’m writing about this because access to the site is secured by managed Information Cards backed by hard tokens. These USB form-factor tokens are issued in the context of the National Authentication Infrastructure initiative of the Singapore Government.

Like custom smart card applications, accessing the portal requires possession of both the physical token and the passphrase for the token, providing true multi-factor authentication. But because the token is accessed via an Information Card by CardSpace, no custom application is needed on the user’s PC. This is a concrete example of a service taking advantage of the ability to employ multi-factor authentication through Information Cards. Read all about it in Vittorio’s detailed description.