In a keynote speech made at the recent SunNetworkSM 2002 Conference and Pavilion at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, Whitfield Diffie, Sun's chief security officer, provocatively suggested that -- rather than being an insurance policy -- secure systems are a critical enabler to the future of business and Net commerce.

A number of technologies and solutions were also announced at the conference, including:

• Open source contribution of Elliptic Curve Cryptographic technologies to the OpenSSL Project
• SuperNets: A secure enterprise network built out of an unsecure, general purpose, network infrastructure, like the Internet
• Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML), an XML-based framework for exchanging security information, now included in the SunTM Open Net Environment (Sun ONE) architecture
• iForce Solution for Security: Perimeter Security
• iForce Solution for Security: Secure Web Server

The Sun Professional ServicesSM program has developed Security Policy and Practice workshops such as the Security Policy Workshop and Security Policy Development Service. Sun's security consultants will work with customers to develop customized policy templates that cover everything from asset classification and controls to information management and maintenance. A new training curriculum focused on security, which extends through perimeter defense and secure e-commerce applications, has also been developed. Core offerings include platform hardening, data integrity and security policy.

Sun also announced its relationship with the Human Firewall Council to jointly develop initiatives for security management assessment that span people, processes and technology. The first initiative Sun is sponsoring is the Security Management Index, the assessment tool that benchmarks security management practices against international standards outlined in ISO 17799.

A free online Security Management Index survey covering ten critical security functions including Policy, Access, Intrusion Prevention and Business Continuity is available online. Participants may also request more information about their particular results, as well as ways to improve security management practices. Also announced was that the Sun Security BluePrintsSM/best practices are being consolidated into a new book by Alex Noordergraaf from Prentice Hall Publishing, to be published soon.

There was also news on the partner front, chiefly that the iForce Security Solutions Program has been launched. This is a channel and partner program that provides an array of marketing resources to help Sun's partners sell security solutions based on the Sun platform. Partner Integration with the Sun ONE Platform for Network Identity is now a reality with five additional security partners -- Banyan Systems France, Business Layers, Entrust, Passlogix and Persistent Co.

For more information on all related announcements, please visit the SunNetwork Conference 2002 Web site at:

http://sunnetwork.sun.com [...read more...]

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