Priva teams with SAIC

Officials at Priva Technologies Inc., a company that specializes in authentication, hope to get more federal customers through a teaming agreement with Science Applications International Corp.

"There's an obvious need in the government market space, so we're focused there" for the next 12 months, said Jeff Minushkin, chief executive officer of Priva.

The company's technology adds an extra layer of authentication for remote users, he said. Systems that use a standard user name and password log-in are vulnerable to anyone who can obtain a user's password. Priva's Cleared Security Platform also makes sure that the user trying to use the log-in information is using the same system from which the authentication information was first registered.

"We fundamentally fix the trust problem," he said.

The teaming agreement with SAIC came after several months of talking and working together, said Bernie Krauss, chief security strategist at SAIC's Enterprise Security Solutions Business Unit.

"When you work with anybody, you want to get a level of trust," he said. "I felt very comfortable [with Priva]. We had a lot of similar goals, similar values."

SAIC can recommend Priva's technology to customers when it seems to be a good fit, he said. There are cases in which it wouldn't.

"There's a lot of approaches to solving the problem of authentication," he said. "It depends on how you want to solve the problem."

Priva's system creates one new problem: Workers in the field, using a different computer, can't get access even if they are authorized, Minushkin said. However, the company's product allows for in-field provisioning to assign temporary credentials to such workers, if agency policy permits.

Priva, which already has Defense Department users, also plans to target financial institutions, Minushkin said. As a small company, Priva has to be careful not to overreach, he said.