FireID, a South African provider of security applications for mobile authentication, has gathered funds worth USD 5 million from US-based investment firm 4Di Capital, technology blog techcrunch.com reports.

The company has revealed plans to use the funds to expand the worldwide distribution of its mobile password authentication products into key markets.

FireID’s Transaction Verification application uses the customer’s mobile phone to generate a unique code for each online transaction, out-of-band from the web browser. This code is dependent upon the full details of the transaction, defined as the transaction amount and account number, and is verified by the FireID server for authenticity.

If an attacker attempts to change any of the defined transaction details, the code will become invalid and the server will detect the tampering. Since FireID leverages the customer’s mobile phone for transaction verification, no hardware tokens are needed.