Online travel service Expedia Inc. has signed up for the tokens and plans to start rolling them out to its employees later this year, said John Millican, the company's chief information security officer. Expedia was already in the process of implementing grid card-based strong authentication technology from Entrust to about 2,500 employees. With the Entrust tokens becoming available, about 1,500 of those employees will now get the new tokens instead, he said.

"We can now provide a higher level of security" to the people who need it at a cost comparable to the grid cards, Millican said. "The grid cards are useful in many areas, but they don't provide the high-level protection" that hardware tokens do, he said. And because both the grid cards and the hardware tokens work on the same Entrust IdentityGuard authentication infrastructure, there's no need to deploy a separate infrastructure to accommodate token-based authentication.

Toffer Winslow, vice president of marketing at RSA, said Entrust's entry into the market with its low-cost token is something the company takes "very seriously."

At the same time, it is important to note that token costs constitute only part of the overall price of hardware-based authentication, he said. Other costs include those associated with the authentication infrastructure, including integrating it and operating it, he said. "We think the right focus should be on the total cost of ownership. Looking at token costs alone misses the point," he said.

In an e-mailed comment, a spokeswoman from Vasco also stressed the importance of looking at the overall costs of the technology.