PayPal, eBay and Yahoo have signed up to support VeriSign's new Identity Protection program (VIP), marketed as a comprehensive solution that will help provide identity protection for consumers online.

VIP allows consumers to use a single security device to authenticate themselves across any future VIP-enabled Web site of network members, such as PayPal, eBay or Yahoo. VIP will make it simpler and more cost-effective for online companies such as financial institutions, ISPs or ecommerce sites to implement stronger authentication by leveraging a shared infrastructure and enabling everyday devices to become authentication devices.

VIP includes a fraud detection component that monitors and detects fraudulent login and transactional fraud in real-time to enable risk-based authentication. A fraud intelligence network, available in the summer of 2006, will allow the sharing of critical fraud data and signatures across VIP-enabled Web sites of network members.

Last fall, eBay's PayPal subsidiary acquired VeriSign's payment gateway business, which allows merchants to authorize, process and manage online payments. At the time, the companies said the acquisition was part of a strategic alliance that called for the two companies to collaborate on payment services and security initiatives for ecommerce.

http://www.verisign.com/dm/vip