Verisign plans authentication management
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VeriSign Inc. officials are launching a managed security service that they believe can cut up to 40 percent of the cost of deploying strong authentication throughout an enterprise.
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PÃ¡draic Brady notes in a new post today that his Services_Yadis package has been official proposed to the PEAR group:   This provides a PHP5 implementation of the Yadis Specification 1.0 a requirement of the OpenID Authentication 2.0 Specification. There are way too many specifications out there! The proposal is a reflection of February's "Zend_Service_Yadis" proposal to the Zend Framework. The main differences (beside the PEARification) were fixing the main bugs the ZF sample code had.   He also mentions his next proposal - to create an OpenID Consumer package.
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VeriSign Inc. VRSN.O on  Wednesday reported a quarterly profit versus a year-ago loss,  driven by an investment gain and strong demand for its  authentication tools and services for the Internet and  telecommunications networks.
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(Source: VeriSign)  Legitimize trust in e-business with new Extended Validation SSL Certificates. Extended Validation SSL triggers a green address bar in Microsoft&trade; IE7, which helps prove site identity. Get the green bar and higher sales by reading the technical white paper.
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RSA Security and America Online hope to encourage AOL customers to better protect account information. And VeriSign is announcing a new service called Unified Authentication to reduce the cost of using one-time passwords or hardware smart cards.
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(InfoWorld) - VeriSign plans to invest $100 million over three years to expand tenfold the DNS (domain name system) infrastructure it operates for the .com and .net top-level domains. The DNS is a multitier system that translates the names given to Internet hosts, such as www.infoworld.com, into numerical addresses. The part VeriSign plans to expand, the top tier, indicates where to find answers for addresses in the .com and .net domains. If it fails, or slows, many Internet services break or falter. This happened on Tuesday, whenÂ attackers disruptedÂ the operations of root DNS servers operated by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and the U.S. Department of Defense. "We're going to make that kind of attack harder against our services," said Ken Silva, VeriSign's chief security officer, on Thursday. Although VeriSign's investment will make the DNS more resistant to such attacks, "This isn't just about the attacks, this is about keeping ahead of the pace of network growth," he added. Services such as Internet telephony or video delivery rely heavily on the DNS infrastructure, and are more susceptible to variations in its performance than applications such as Web browsing. An additional 40 millisecond delay in providing an address might not be noticeable to Web surfers, but it can have a big effect on VOIP (voice over Internet Protcol) operators, Silva said. Through a project known as Titan, VeriSign will reinforce its DNS infrastructure in two ways. The first will be to increase server and bandwidth capacity tenfold at around 20 existing sites, taking bandwidth from 20GbpsÂ to over 200Gbps. The changes will allow VeriSign to respond to over 4 trillion DNS queries a day, from 400 billion today. VeriSign will also expand the number of sites where it operates DNS servers to around 100, Silva said. Those extra sites will bring the DNS closer to regional network operators in countries such as Ireland, one of the trial sites for VeriSign's new infrastructure. There, it has peered with many of the local network operators, so the DNS requests of Irish Internet users don't have to travel halfway across Europe to be resolved: they are dealt with on the spot. VeriSign already operates regional sites in Brazil, China, Egypt, Kenya and South Korea, and plans to open sites in Chile, Germany, India and South Africa, among others. In addition to improving performance, these changes will make the system more secure by restricting the effects of attacks such as the one seen Tuesday to a smaller geographic area, Silva said. VeriSign expects the number of attacks launched over the Internet to increase in size and scope by 50 percent a year over the next two years. Even without an increase in the number of attacks, VeriSign faces a significant challenge in keeping all its DNS servers up to date and in step with one another. Much of the theoretical work on that was begun in another project, Atlas, in 2002, Silva said. "It has gotten to the point where we can now go for scalability," he added. VeriSign has developed new "zone push" techniques to distribute database changes, and will use a VPN (virtual private network) and dedicated data connections to ensure server updates are not disrupted, Silva said. Stratton Sclavos, VeriSign's CEO, is due to provide more details on the company's Titan project in a keynote address at theÂ RSA ConferenceÂ in San Francisco at 2 p.m. Pacific Time on Thursday. Â
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VeriSign is undertaking a $100 million expansion of a crucial part of the system that speeds Web users to their destinations.
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Among the factors sited: the ability to customize the software and avoid vendor lock-in.
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Companies will offer a service that authenticates movies, music, and games.
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The goal of the suite is to keep users from having to remember separate passwords and authentication credentials for each system or application.
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(InfoWorld) - Intel's move to provide new integration with NAC (network access control) tools in its latest vPro desktop processors could provide interesting opportunities for use with the device authentication systems while further strengthening the technology standards it supports, according to industry watchers. One of a handful of new security features built into the vPro Core 2 Duo chips introduced by Intel on Monday, the added support for the 802.1x standard for NAC and interoperability with Cisco's Network Admission Control guideline -- delivered via the processors' Intel Embedded Trust Agent -- could help accelerate adoption of the device authentication systems while solidifying support for the two formats, experts said. NAC systems are used to scan device and user authentication information whenever a machine attempts to log onto to a network protected by the tools. In addition to protecting against potential break-ins from uninvited outsiders, the tools are also considered a useful alternative for enterprises to employ in segregating access to IT systems shared with partners or contractors. Using the Embedded Trust Agent, Intel said that it can now provide NAC systems -- including any built on the 802.1x or Cisco NAC platforms -- to garner device identity information directly from processor, bypassing the need for the authentication technologies to interact with PC operating system software. One of the potential methods to circumvent NAC systems outlined by security researchers thus far has been to use some method to spoof or misrepresent device information to dupe the network defense tools. By presenting machine identity data on the processor, such attacks could be largely eliminated, Intel officials said. While Intel did not promote direct linkage between Embedded Trust Agent and Microsoft's flavor of NAC -- known as Network Access Protection and already integrated into the software giant's Vista OS -- Cisco and Microsoft have previously announced an agreement to make all of their respective network authentication systems compatible. Similar support for NAC on mobile platforms will arrive with Intel's next batch of Centrino chips, slated for shipment sometime in 2008, said company officials. Cisco officials participating in Intel's vPro launch said that the CPU-level NAC integration could prove to be a significant accelerant to adoption of the technology, which most industry experts have charted as relatively slow thus far, despite the networking giant's claim that many of its customers are tuning on the next-generation authentication systems. "The strength of NAC is certainly based on the reliability of the information that you can present to the network, and having direct access to information on the hardware provides a whole new opportunity that hasn't been present only with OS interaction," said Brendan O'Connell, senior product manager for Cisco's Security Technology Group. "In the past, even with existing NAC systems, what's happened is that when a PC starts up on the network, the security decision is held off while other things are being run in the background, but we're hoping to see that change and get in the door earlier," he said. "There are some big advantages for getting this type of information to present device security posture assessment sooner in the process, both for desktops and down the road for other types of devices." Chip technology providers have attempted to market similar CPU-based security tools -- most notably Phoenix Technologies -- but those efforts have gone largely ignored by customers with Phoenix recently scrapping its core software security products based on insufficient demand. Other third-party NAC technology providers said that Intel's move to embrace NAC should help drive new interest in the systems and codify the industry around the standards it has chosen to support. "On a functional level, this should prove useful by speeding up testing. Instead of waiting for a machine to boot up to get a posture assessment, the NAC system will already recognize the machine's attributes and begin assigning privileges," said Alan Shimel, chief strategy officer for StillSecure, a maker of NAC software. Shimel pointed out that while a nice addition, most NAC systems will still need some form of user identification data, typically provided via software that runs on a device OS, to offer full authentication capabilities. "It will be interesting to see if AMD adopts a similar approach and the same standards; that could have a good effect on the industry as a whole," he said. "It's good to see that Intel is supporting 802.1x because that's the standard most other NAC vendors are working with." While CPU-level integration is a nice addition, some industry watchers maintain it will still be some time before NAC is deployed widely by large numbers of enterprise customers. Because NAC doesn't directly address external threats or efforts to comply with government regulations, such as the Payment Card Industry data security guideline, most companies aren't yet budgeting for NAC tools, said Paul Stamp, analyst with Forrester Research. "The problem with NAC is that in itself it satisfies no compliance mandate directly, and it doesn't protect against any specific type of attack. The real driver for NAC will be when businesses begin to demand so much mobility and collaboration that current security technologies can't meet those goals," Stamp said. "People are struggling to find a driver for NAC right now, and this type of platform-level interaction could be important when they do, but it could be another five years before we see real demand."
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By Altus, Celeste  MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA: VeriSign has moved its PR account to Weber Shandwick, already putting the agency to work on various projects, including for the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week.
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RSA Security Inc. on Monday plans to announce availability of its new RSA Sign-On Manager, a product it says will make it easier for users to log-in to multiple applications and simplify password management for organizations.
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Secure and Reliable Email, IM, Calendaring
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Verisign (Quote, Chart) has launched its new name server initiative, a move designed to improve the speed with which .com and .net DNS zone files are updated.
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(Source: Fairway Consulting)  Sticky notes with passwords all over your office? Fairway Consulting Group provides a painless way to have one password that provides central user management for all of your ESX servers using LDAP as well as Kerberos Authentication.
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(Source: VeriSign)  In today's complex Web-based world, threats to your company are more damaging than ever. But these threats don't always come from the outside. Instead, they often come from your very own employees. How can a company adequately defend itself? Learn how VeriSign iDefense Security Intelligence Services can help.