While business units are constantly moving towards digitalization, the security factor can never be sabotaged. To enable digital security, OTP SMS gateway adds up a layer of 2-factor authentication to all business-customer activities. To name, financial transactions and portal logins are a couple of B2C activities that need 2-factor authentication or 2FA.
Need for OTP SMS gateways
Cybercrime is one of the biggest threats to online B2C activities. With increasing time and technology, hacking customer credentials such as username and passwords is no rocket science. Malicious software, unauthorized links, human errors and data breaches further make B2C activities more prone to cybercrime. 2FA is an advanced technique to prevent customers from being bait to such cybercrime and perform digital activities with complete security. Stated simply, 2FA technique features the customer to pass two digital security checks for gaining access and completing B2C activities. These steps are:
- Step 1: Entering user credentials, .i.e. username and password.
- Step 2: Enter auto-generated one-time passwords or OTPs.
Considering user outlook, the customer already has his predefined credentials that could be entered in step 1. The OTP is received by the user as a text SMS on registered mobile number. On business architecture, these automated SMS are sent using gateway integrations such as PHP SMS gateway integration.
Here it is worth discussing that 2FA is one of the most inexpensive yet effective security features used by the business industry in the 21st century. While hackers can fetch user credentials using data infractions and hacks, there are no possibilities to gain access to OTP without proper authentication.
OTP SMS gateway is SMS software that channels OTP messages to the mobile numbers using advanced scripting. Many gateway service providers offer a variety of gateway integration depending upon the business needs. PHP SMS gateway integration is one of the most practised SMS gateways in the current year.
Let us consider an example of a banking transaction to understand the use of SMS gateway in 2FA.
Say, for instance, the customer wants to digitally send money using a banking portal. To prevent unauthorized users from performing this activity, the 2FA authentication process is implemented here. Under the flag of this authentication, the following process is adopted.
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Generation of OTP
The first step is the generation of a one-time pin. Once the user has entered his credentials, the automated software generates random OTP code.
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Sending code via OTP SMS gateway
Once the code is generated, this can be sent to the desired mobile number. OTP SMS gateway is designed to send these messages within seconds. The user is then asked to enter this auto-generated code along with the credentials.
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Code verification
Once the code is submitted on user-end, it is compared with the initial OTP in backend and verified. If the user input matches exactly with the source OTP, the user is granted access to complete his financial transaction securely. In other situations, the user is prompted about invalid code and thus denied transaction access.
