WS Security tops RSA show agenda

Federated identity and Web services security will dominate the agenda at the annual RSA Conference that kicks off in San Francisco this week.

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RSA Security, VeriSign, and the Liberty Alliance Project will use the event to launch products that address security-related issues that hinder Web services adoption.

Set to make a splash at the RSA Conference, the Liberty Alliance is expected to unveil the second phase of its federated identity collaboration called Identity Web Services Framework (ID-WSF).

The framework will map out how the Alliance will develop ID services for PC and low-capability client devices such as mobile phones and PDAs that do not require a server connection, said Simon Pugh, vice-president of Standards and Infrastructure at MasterCard and a member of Liberty Alliance Project's management board.

ID-WSF will also push the concept of permissions-based sharing. "Our goal is not that [the information] get collected together in one site. But I as a consumer need to control how that information is used: expressed permission from principle, what to do, whether to approve the request," Pugh said. In the future, Liberty will create ID Discovery Services and Definition of Services Profiles, some of which could be offered outside of the alliance, he added.

The news reflects the need for automated and interoperable security products to navigate through critical areas such as XML signature and XML decryption/encryption practices, said Jason Bloomberg, a senior analyst at Boston-based ZapThink.

"An important central theme [at the RSA Conference] is that WS Security is reaching its tipping point and becoming broadly implemented in a variety of products," Bloomberg said.

To that end, RSA will unveil its RSA BSAFE software developer toolkit to enable the creation of standards-based interoperable security for Web services. In conjunction with BSAFE, RSA will announce its new Identity and Access Management Strategy bolstered behind its new integrated product system architecture.

Currently in the hands of Oasis and authored by IBM, Microsoft, and VeriSign, WS Security provides a foundation for secure Web services featuring road map concepts such as policy and trust. WS Security defines a set of SOAP message headers used for protecting Web services applications.

Future versions of RSA BSAFE will tie in to RSA SecurID two-factor authentication tokens, Kerberos tickets, and SAML assertions, said Mike Veragara, director of product marketing at Bedford, Mass.-based RSA.

"When people think of ID access management they think of people. In the Web services world, people really aren't as important as devices or applications. That's the critical component we're talking about here," Veragara said.

Developers may find it surprising that RSA's new SDK is a C toolkit rather than Java, said ZapThink's Bloomberg. He attributes the move to improved performance and noted that RSA can provide a Java or C-Sharp SOAP wrapper upon request. Also, the SDK can be used on a client or mobile device rather than simply an application server.

VeriSignwill put its spin on a crowded field of XML application gateways at RSA this week by introducing its VeriSign Trust Gateway. Trust Gateway allows customers building Web services to offload message policy configuration, deployment, and management to VeriSign's managed public key infrastructure (PKI) and real-time validation services back end, said Sundar Krishnamurthy, product manager at VeriSign based in Mountain View, Calif. Sitting outside the firewall, the product supports Microsoft.NET and Sun One platforms.

VeriSignwill announce a few primary partners to streamline Trust Gateway's performance. Hardware vendors nCipher and Chrysalis-ITS will give VeriSign security modules that allow enterprises to speed up all cryptographic and SSL accelerations. In addition, VeriSign will integrate Trust Gateway technology with Confluent Software to provide monitoring and manage all transactions traveling through the gateway and into the back-end Web services.

Given solutions such as Microsoft Office 2003, which can make SOAP calls over a network and request confidential information including passwords, and given that XML travels right through traditional firewalls, Bloomberg said organizations want to mitigate existing risks dealing with insecure XML traffic. "What's happening in a lot of companies is the level of XML traffic on a network is starting to explode because there are a volume of applications that are communicating with XML," he remarked.