Editorial

Digital ID Directory: MIRACL

TDP met with Michael Tanaka, Chief Commercial Officer at MIRACL to discuss their new Digital ID Directory entry and growing their UK business

Posted 17 March 2021 by Matt Stanley


Hi Michael; to begin with can you please give us an overview of your company and its offering?

Sure. MIRACL was founded at the start of 2019 but our technology roots go back at least 20 years to when Mike Scott, MIRACL’s Chief Crypto Officer, first pioneered the use of Pairing-based Cryptography and became the “S” in the widely used BLS and KSS families of elliptic curves.

Since that time, we have licensed our technology and provided services to nearly 100 of the largest and most security conscious organisations in the world including Google, Microsoft, Intel, The USA Military, Experian and many other companies within many other industries.

MIRACL Trust ID, our signature Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) service, holds a number of impressive claims such as:

  1. The world’s only MFA that runs on any device – Desktop, Mobile, iPad, Smart TV or even Embedded Device
  2. The world’s fastest software MFA login, at only 2 seconds start to finish
  3. The world’s only hardware independent, single-step MFA
Michael Tanaka – CMO at MIRACL

Great, thanks. So, now let’s dig a bit deeper: what is your value proposition – how do you specifically help a customer?

Passwords still play a part in over 95% of log-ins to products and services across the world, yet since the early days of the internet, over 25 years ago, people have understood the fact that Passwords can no longer secure a world with near infinite interconnections.

Nonetheless they persist because passwords are:

  1. simple for users
  2. easily deployed to any service or device
  3. inexpensive to operate 

This leads us to the ultimate conclusion that Usability is a pre-requisite and without it, security is meaningless. After all, what use is the best security in the world if nobody can or wants to use it?

There are plenty of secure alternatives, but they all fail in one or more of those requirements. As an example, RSA Hardware Tokens fail in all three as they are complex to operate, very difficult to deploy and maintain in the wild and are beyond the financial means of most organisations to purchase for end users.

Of course, the tier 1 banking industry has manged to live with those shortcomings but there are very few examples outside of that. Imagine the chaos that would ensue if the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) decided to deploy RSA tokens to all of its clients!

Similarly, the Google Authenticator app scores well in affordability but fails in the other two. It is complex and unwieldly for users and requires a mobile to log-in to any other device. The result is that it is that for many organisations it is impractical or impossible to displace passwords with the technologies generally available today.

This is where MIRACL Trust ID can make a big difference. We replace insecure passwords, expensive SMS texts and complex MFA with a secure authentication service that is simple for users, works on any device, allows a direct login without secondary hardware, and costs a fraction of an SMS text to operate. 

As an example, take a look at a very common arrangement where you have a limited number of core users, a much larger number of engaged end users and then an even greater number of peripheral users. For example, a University with staff, students and alumni or a Government department with staff, dependent clients and the broader public.

Most legacy MFA solutions are targeted towards the enterprise, so high per-user pricing, user friction and administration overheads are generally tolerated. Once you hit the second tier of engaged end-users, costs, deployment challenges and the user’s ability to operate the technology become a real challenge. By the time you hit the third-tier peripheral users (alumni and the broader public in the two examples above) those challenges have become insurmountable obstacles.

By providing a 100-1000x improvement in security whilst also improving the user experience relative to passwords, at a total cost of ownership which is less than passwords, we then enable any organisation to deploy strong MFA to every user within their ecosystem.

Do you have UK customers that we might have heard of?

MIRACL Trust ID was selected by Experian to provide secure authentication for the public’s access to the GOV.UK services. [View MIRACL/Experian case study here]

“Protecting the person online and giving them a good user experience of the services they are using is a key goal for us as a business. MIRACL is a pioneering company that helps us achieve that”. Nick Mothershaw, Former UK&I Director of Identity and Fraud, Experian.

What is the MIRACL Digital Identity story, in a sentence?

We enable any organisation, large or small, to replace insecure passwords, expensive SMS texts or complex MFA with a secure authentication service that provides for all of its users not just its staff.

Nice, and do you have a particular public sector angle you also want to highlight for our readers?

We are in the final stages of validation of our integration to HEANet’s core service which it provides to Universities across Ireland. When complete in 2-3 weeks’ time we will be one of only 3 companies (Microsoft, Duo and us), to achieve this status. This was driven by our ability to provide for staff, students and alumni where currently the latter two categories are massively under served.

Finally, if we come back in 12 months from now to refresh your profile in the Directory, what would you like to be able to say you’d achieved or progressed in the intervening time?

As of end March 2021 we will have deployed to our first educational authority. The Qatar Music Academy is Qatar’s national institute for music where MIRACL is securing teachers, parents and students. I would expect by the end of 2021 one of our educational partners will be able to lay claim as being the first institute of higher education to deploy secure MFA to 100% of their ecosystem of staff, students and alumni.

You can view the MIRACL Digital ID Directory listing here.