Web services, ID management dominate RSA show

Future versions of RSA Bsafe Secure-WS will tie in to RSA SecurID two-factor authentication tokens, Kerberos tickets, and SAML assertions, said Mike Veragara, director of product marketing for 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," said Veragara.

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 improving performance and noted that RSA can provide a Java or C# SOAP wrapper upon request.

Also, the SDK can be used on a client or mobile device rather than simply an application server.

Finally, VeriSign will 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 PKI (public key infrastructure) and real-time validation services back-end, said Sundar Krishnamurthy, product manager at Mountain View, Calif.-based VeriSign.

Sitting outside of the firewall, the product supports Microsoft.Net and Sun ONE (Open Net Environment) platforms.

VeriSign will 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 managing all transactions traveling through the gateway and into the back-end Web services.

Citing examples such as Microsoft Office 2003, which can make SOAP calls over a network and request confidential information including passwords and being 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 said.