News

RSA integrates ID management; discloses 'Nightingale'

• By John K. Waters
• April 21, 2003

RSA Security has announced that it will integrate its products into a single identity-management system that will deliver common administration and integration of its security solutions across the enterprise. The company made the announcement at its 12th annual RSA Conference, which drew an estimated 10,000 attendees last week in San Francisco.

RSA also unveiled a technology known as "Nightingale," a new solution employing a technique called "secret splitting" that is designed to protect data against both internal and external threats.

The core of the integrated system is a standards-based set of common services, code-named "Nexus," that will serve as the foundation for all of RSA's enterprise products going forward, company reps said. Nexus will unite RSA's enterprise security products, including ClearTrust access management, RSA mobile one-time access codes, SecureID two-factor authentication and Keon digital certificates. Together, these products will provide a number of common services, including management, identity authority services, access authority and integration services.

"It's an incremental change," said John Worral, product marketing manager at RSA. "We have interoperability. The next level is integration."

Nexus will be compliant with Liberty Alliance authentication and other features, such as provisioning, will be provided by third-party vendors, Worral said.

Meanwhile, RSA's "Nightingale," developed by the company's RSA Labs research arm, is a system that is engineered to enhance the security and privacy of conventional servers for particularly sensitive data -- things like healthcare information, credit card numbers, cryptographic keys and personal information used for password reset.

Secret splitting is a process that distributes sensitive data and stores it cryptographically in two separate locations: the Nightingale server and any application server. This data-splitting strategy is designed to foil an attacker who compromises either server.