Novell Enables Rapid Adoption of Identity Management

Novell Enables Rapid Adoption of Identity Management by Open Sourcing
Key Technologies 

 

Working within the larger identity and open source communities, the
Bandit project will address common identity management requirements   

 

WALTHAM, Mass. -- June 12, 2006 -- Novell today announced the creation
of Bandit(TM), a groundbreaking open source project with a charter to
unify disparate identity systems and provide a consistent approach to
securing and managing identity.  The identity services in development by
the Bandit community are open source and will work with existing
industry standards such as WS- * and Liberty Federation, and open source
projects including Eclipse Higgins. Novell has already contributed
significant engineering resources and code to jump start this effort.
Ultimately, the goal of the Bandit project is to provide organizations
with a consistent approach to enterprise identity management challenges
such as secure, role-based access and regulatory compliance reporting. 

 

"The Bandit project is looking to address one of the toughest challenges
in identity management today -- provide a consistent approach to
securing and managing identity," said Mike Neuenschwander, vice
president and research director for the Burton Group. "The creation of
identity services that abstract the complexity of identity systems and
that are interoperable and freely available is a worthwhile goal and
represents an important inflection point in the ongoing development of
the identity management market." 

 

While many organizations deploy identity management technologies today,
disparate vendor solutions can create complexity and potentially slow
adoption.  By developing an open source enablement layer, Novell and the
Bandit community will make it possible to standardize identity
management across differing systems and resources. Bandit's freely
available code can then be overlayed on an existing identity management
system. 

 

The Bandit project is focused on delivering a single, consistent
experience of digital identity and includes several common identity
services such as authentication, roles, policy and compliance: 

 

The Common Authentication Services Adapter (CASA) provides interoperable
authentication that enables application and enterprise single sign-on
with a secure vault for user and system credentials.   

 

The Common Identity service is an implementation of the Higgins
framework for representing digital identity.   

 

The Role Engine service can be integrated into any application to
consistently calculate role information and unify authorization across
systems.   

 

The Audit Record Framework service provides an open auditing and
compliance API and receives audit records from Bandit's open identity
services and other applications to provide common identity and event
information to verify security and compliance. 

 

Novell already incorporates some of Bandit's open identity services
within its SUSE(R)  Linux distribution and plans to include Bandit's
identity services in future releases of other products.  Novell will
continue to support the Bandit project with substantial engineering
resources and will maintain the project while the Bandit community
grows. 

 

"The Bandit project was created in response to our customers' need to
reduce the complexity of identity management in the enterprise," said
Jeff Jaffe, executive vice president and chief technology officer for
Novell.  "The industry needs to come together and deliver common
identity services that provide a consistent experience, regardless of
the underlying infrastructure.  Novell's initial sponsorship of the
Bandit project is a natural extension of our leadership in both identity
and open source, and we are gratified to see the groundswell of
community support." 

 

A Community-driven Approach to Enterprise Identity Management 

 

The Bandit project builds upon the participation of the broader identity
and open source communities and many industry leaders are expressing
their support and commitment to the goals of the Bandit project. 

 

PARTNER QUOTES: 

 

Dominic Fedronic, chief technology officer for ActivIdentity Inc., said,
"The deployment of digital identity assurance and strong authentication
solutions for both government and enterprise would greatly benefit from
seamless interoperability and tight integration with identity management
systems.  ActivIdentity supports Novell's leadership with the Bandit
project and Higgins as we believe the resulting open industry standards
will expand the market and deliver greater value to customers." 

 

Paul Trevithick, technology lead for the Higgins project at the Eclipse
Foundation, said, "We are very pleased that Novell is promoting the
adoption of open source identity technologies and that the Bandit
project is contributing to and leveraging Higgins. Bandit is providing
an important service by making an open identity infrastructure available
on enterprise platforms including SUSE Linux." 

 

Anthony Nadalin, Distinguished Engineer and Chief Security Architect for
IBM, said, "IBM is pleased that Novell is using Higgins as the Identity
Management foundation for the Bandit project. As a leading proponent of
open source, IBM is committed to working with the Eclipse Higgins
community to solve the identity-related challenges our customers face
everyday." 

 

George Goodman, president of the Liberty Alliance management board and
director, Platform Capabilities Lab at Intel, said, "Liberty Alliance
welcomes open initiatives that bring the industry closer to achieving a
ubiquitous interoperable privacy-respecting identity layer for the
Internet. We salute the Bandit team for contributing open source that
will help advance the deployment of Liberty-enabled federations and Web
services on the widest possible scale." 

 

Kim Cameron, architect of Identity and Access for Microsoft, said: "The
Identity Metasystem provides a model for identity interoperability
across the industry.  We're happy to see Novell playing an active role
in helping realize the Identity Metasystem and look forward to working
with them to ensure interoperability between our respective products." 

 

Jim Gerken, practice manager for identity management with Novacoast,
said, "We have spent years connecting disparate authentication
repositories which confirms the need for consistent and standard
identity services. With Novell's leadership in identity and open source,
Bandit is a natural community for   Novell to create that leverages its
position in both markets." 

 

Bob Lord, Red Hat senior director engineering, said, "Red Hat supports
open source initiatives to build stronger identity frameworks and
controls based on open standards.  The Bandit project provides several
initiatives that will help simplify identity management in heterogeneous
environments and drive further innovation for the enterprise.  We look
forward to working with the open source community to extend a flexible
identity framework from desktop to server, network to application." 

 

Sara Gates, vice president of Identity Management at Sun Microsystems,
said, "As a co-founder of the Liberty Alliance and a leading champion of
open source, we have seen firsthand how customers are embracing open
source technologies as a way to accelerate business solutions and reduce
their costs. We strongly support the move of identity management
services into the open source community." 

 

Dick Hardt, Sxip Identity founder and CEO, said, "The identity
management industry needs a common approach to secure, role-based access
and compliance reporting for the enterprise and open source projects
like Bandit from Novell and Higgins are a great step in that direction.
We see this as a natural compliment to the user-centric Identity 2.0
efforts being  made with SXIP and DIX and are excited to work with them
on adding  support of Bandit, Higgins and eDirectory(TM)." 

 

Rob Clyde, Symantec vice president of technology, office of the CTO,
said, "Symantec is a strong supporter of open source initiatives that
enable developer communities and vendors to work together to create
flexible solutions capable of meeting the diverse needs of our
customers.  Companies today face a tremendous challenge as they try to
integrate disparate application systems and security infrastructures
each with its own authentication technologies into a cohesive,
manageable solution.  A standards-based approach backed by an open
source implementation is a beneficial step towards addressing the vexing
problem of identity management." 

 

Jonathan Alexander, Trusted Network Technologies vice president of
engineering, said, "Bandit is addressing key customer challenges, such
as integrating distributed identity and roles, that we see as we help
customers deploy our identity security and audit solutions.  We see the
Bandit and Higgins projects as filling a critical need to tie disparate
identity systems together into a more pervasive, integrated and powerful
solution." 

 

About Novell 

 

Novell, Inc. (Nasdaq: NOVL) delivers Software for the Open
Enterprise(TM). With more than 50,000 customers in 43 countries, Novell
helps customers manage, simplify, secure and integrate their technology
environments by leveraging best-of-breed, open standards-based software.
With over 20 years of experience, 5,000 employees, 5,000 partners and
support centers around the world, Novell helps customers gain control
over their IT operating environment while reducing cost. More
information about Novell can be found at http://www.novell.com. 

 

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Novell and SUSE are registered trademarks and Bandit and eDirectory are
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