The new guidelines will clarify the FFIEC's existing guidelines on the subject and more explicitly inform banks about what they need to do to bolster online authentication, said Avivah Litan, an analyst at Gartner.

Litan recently met with the FFIEC's IT subcommittee to discuss the updates. "They have been talking about it and debating it for a while," Litan said. "My understanding is that [the subcommittee meeting] was the last step in the process before they issue the new guidance."

The FFIEC is an interagency council that develops standards for the federal auditing of financial institutions by bodies such as the Federal Reserve System and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC).

In 2005, it , titled "Authentication in an Internet Banking Environment." They called on banks to upgrade their single-factor authentication processes -- typically based on user name and passwords -- with a stronger, second form of authentication by the end of 2006.

The guidance left it largely up to the banks to choose whatever second form of authentication that they felt was the most appropriate for their needs. The FFIEC listed several available authentication technologies that banks could choose from, including biometrics, one-time passwords and token-based authentication.