Sponsors, exhibitors and participating organizations took the opportunity provided by the Digital ID World Conference 2004 to make some news. Verisign, Oblix, Unisys, PingIdentity, Deloitte & Touche, Courion, Trusted Network Technologies, Abridean, MphasiS, Thor and the Liberty Alliance all made annoucements over the period of the show.

Verisign announced it has expanded its global security alliance with IBM and announced a joint demonstration with AOL of a "safe chat room” for kids and teens that uses authentication technology to verify a child’s age. Oblix announced that it is continuing to build on its momentum in the identity management market. Unisys announced the results of a new research study on identity and access management (IAM) that found that information technology decision makers view IAM as key to increasing enterprise security, managing IT costs and enabling compliance with government regulations. Ping Identity Corporation announced the release of PingFederate and PingDeploy – enterprise software for identity federation.

Deloitte & Touche and Courion announced they have formed a strategic alliance that will expand the identity management services offered by Deloitte & Touche. Trusted Network Technologies announced that it has enhanced its access policy definition and expanded deployment options in the 1.7 release of its Identity product. Abridean announced the release of abrideanProvisor(tm) 5.1, which provides enhancements to Abridean's user management and provisioning product suite. Thor and MphasiS announced the availability of the MphasiS Portal User Provisioning Solution (PortalUP), powered by Thor’s Xellerate Identity Manager.

The Liberty Alliance, the global consortium developing an open federated identity standard and business tools for implementing identity-based services, announced products and services from 12 companies have earned the Liberty Alliance Interoperable mark in the latest Liberty-sponsored conformance test – the first event to test against the Liberty Identity Web Services specification ID-WSF 1.0. Alcatel, Elios, IBM, NEC, Nokia, Novell, NTT, Oracle, Ping Identity, Sun Microsystems, Symlabs and Trustgenix have all been awarded the “Liberty Alliance Interoperable” mark. The Liberty Alliance Project also announced work is underway to understand the requirements to improve the methods by which users are identified, with the intent of reducing the risks and exposure to threats, including identity theft and phishing.

Netegrity has announced the next major release of its Netegrity® IdentityMinder® product. This latest edition of IdentityMinder features support for relational databases, a new Web service interface, and additional user management features. IdentityMinder is a component of Netegrity’s identity and access management product set, which includes user management, provisioning, access management, and Web services security capabilities.

It's not clear yet how the acquisition of Netegrity by Computer Associates will affect the Netegrity product range. For the moment at least, Netegrity seem to be pushing ahead with their product marketing as if the acquisition announcement didn't happen. In support of the release of IdentityMinder 6.0, they are running a series of seminars featuring Sony Pictures, Reynolds and Reynolds, and Burton Group.

Another independent IdM vendor was gobbled up by one of the industry giants last week, when Computer Associates announced their intention to acquire Netegrity for $430 million. Netegrity's IdM suite of products, including their flagship Access Management product SiteMinder, will be integrated with CA's eTrust Identity and Access Management line of products.

The acquistion continues in the tradition of large vendors swallowing up smaller, specialist IdM players started when IBM acquired provisioning vendor Access360. This was soon followed by Sun acquiring Waveset and then Netegrity themselves acquiring Business Layers.

As might be expected, CA and Netegrity were cockahoop at the news. "By adding the best Web security product on the market to its portfolio, CA significantly strengthens its leading position in identity and access management (IAM), " said CA's Chief Executive Officer Kenneth Cron. "Security continues to be critically important to CA, and we will ensure that we offer customers the broadest and deepest IAM suite in the industry.” Netegrity Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer Barry Bycoff was equally upbeat. “I believe the combination of Computer Associates’ global market presence along with its broad portfolio of market leading products and focus on the security market are expected to provide us with the best way to leverage our early market leadership," Mr Bycoff said.

Not everyone thought the acquisition was such a good idea, however. A Gartner article warned that existing Netegrity customers should be concerned as the move "may help CA customers, but will likely provide little value to non-CA customers." Netegrity's competitors lined up to express their concerns too (although whether these were a reflect of real concern is open to interpretation), and Sun moved swiftly to announce a no-cost program that automates the migration of accounts from SiteMinder to Sun's equivalent, the Sun Java System Access Manager.

Adobe has temed with Geotrust to create a new identity-based document verification service. This service will use Geotrust certificates, Adobe PDF reader, and an iKey USB credential token to provide document authenticity proof and anti-tapering protection.

The infrastructure was quietly put into Adobe PDF reader 6.0, and this new service leverages it. Users may purchase authentication tokens at a nominal fee, and there is a "vetting" process to assure the user's identity.

Interestingly, Adobe is touting this as a way around email insecurity. By assuring that the attached PDF document came from the claimed author and hasn't been altered, they say the insecurity of the transport medium becomes insignificant. Yet another case where the question isn't "is identity the answer?" but rather "where is the right place to apply identity to assure easier deployment and wider utility?"

Casio showed a combined LCD and Fingerprint scanner they say will make it easier to incorporate fingerprint biometrics into cell phones. By incorporating biometric scanning into the LCD display saves space which is at a premium on cell phones.

Fujitsu and NTT DoCoMo already incorporate fingerprint scanning into their cell phones, and using fingerprint authentication for cell phone purchases is gaining traction in Japan.

IBM aren't the only platform vendor making RFID news. The recent EPCglobal conference saw Sun, Microsoft and HP all making clear their commitment to the technology...

Sun announced the next phase in its support for RFID at the EPCglobal Conference last week. The announcement highlighted several RFID-related initiatives including an RFID partner program, an RFID retail compliance program, and an RFID warehouse management solution that combines products and services from Sun, SIS Technologies and SSA Global.

Not to be outdone, the next day Microsoft announced it is expanding the scope of its Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) initiative to help small and midmarket segment businesses meet RFID technology compliance mandates from large trading partners and drive efficiencies in internal operations.

Last, but not least, HP made a joint announcement with deployment partners BearingPoint, detailing the launch of a collaborative RFID solution set for the retail industry. The offering will help retailers manage their inventory with up-to-the-minute supply chain visibility, as well as monitor and collect customer-buying patterns to better anticipate consumer demand.

EPCglobal voted Friday to move the Gen 2 RFID standard to candidate status. Next, prototype tags and readers will be made based on the standard and tested. Then will come the final vote for ratification.

The one potential wrinkle that could delay a vote to ratify the standard is the ongoing licensing negotiations with Intermec, which says that it holds patents that would be infringed by the Gen 2 spec.

A consortium at UCLA is expected to demo its new .NET RFID middleware next week at its campus conference. "The middleware is designed to run on servers hosting supply-chain or warehouse-management applications to assess and process the RFID data. The application also is being adapted for medical and pharmaceutical industries, as well as the Department of Defense."

IBM unveiled a Thinkpad with built in fingerprint sensor today. IBM was among the first to push Trusted Computing by making "security chips" available on most Thinkpad models, and now is taking the next step by integrating fingerprint sensors with trusted computing.

IBM is learning how to make trusted computing useful on a client-only basis, and is building a significant deployed base of trusted computing enabled computers in the process. Now, by letting a finger swipe allow secure access to encrypted hard drive data and passwords they are taking the next step.