Every time a call center agent uses customer’s personal data to provide him assistance or to activate services, he visualises strictly reserved information which, in any case, have to be used protecting privacy.

Only authorized agents can access to customer’s data to proceed with the assistance so it is necessary to have an efficient identification system which can avoid unauthorized accesses. That’s why Bit4id recently developed for TIM a token management system for two-factor authentication.

Now TIM agents use for their identification not only username and password but also a key or a smartcard (these are the two factors of the strong authentication, one “abstract” and one “concrete”): in this way the access to information is traced and it’s possible to discover which data have been visualised by an agent, when and why.

Although the introduction of the hardware makes hard enough unauthorized access, an even safer solution was chosen for those agents who have the possibility to enable wiretapping with judiciary permission: for these ones Bit4id introduced biometric identification. The smartcard can be unlocked only with the fingerprint of the agent and, after this first recognition, username and password are also required. In this case the authentication is even stronger and is defined three-factor authentication because of the triple recognition procedure (fingerprint, hardware, username and password). Biometric identification ensures that only allowed staff can proceed with some particular operations.

Besides providing the infrastructure for the strong authentication, Bit4id also provided TIM with the system to manage the entire flow of distribution and activation of the introduced objects, a very complex system at enterprise level that is fully integrated with many more TIM systems and applications, which access will occur through one single token.

Bit4id system passed the test and trial phases of the TIM security area and is currently in roll out, in other words it has been gradually adopted by different work groups to check the right mode of operation.