FIPS-140* compliance has gained overwhelming attention these days and it has become a mandatory requirement for several security sensitive applications (mostly in Government and Security solutions and recently with select finance industry solutions and particularly for achieving compliance with regulatory mandates such as PCI DSS, FISMA, HIPPA, etc ). FIPS-140 also helps defining security requirements for supporting integration with cryptographic hardware and software tokens. Ensuring… Read more »
Just read this interesting research paper published by Prof. Bobby Tait and Prof. Basie von Solms of the University of Johannesburg (South Africa), explains how a person’s biometric fingerprints/Iris scans can be used as a protocol to perform private key based encryption and digital signatures. The paper describes a biometric middleware infrastructure (BioVault) which requires users to performs biometric authentication for generating or retrieving a random… Read more »
Lately I’ve been franctically busy with couple of my ISVs and an SI helping them out on a Citizen-scale National Healthcare Identity Infrastructure solution pilot for one of the populous countries in the Atlantic region – Sorry I cannot disclose the country’s name to abide their privacy laws and to protect my job :-). The solution aims to deliver an Unified Desktop/Voice Infrastructure via Sun Ray… Read more »
Lately, Biometric identification and authentication technologies gaining unprecedented importance in government organizations across the globe as evidenced in the US by introduction of HSPD-12, HSPD-24 and and other countries complying with ICAO requirements for biometric-enhanced machined readable traveller documents (MRTDs) / ePassports providing support for Facial/Fingerprint identification for travelers passing through airports, security-sensitive locations and ensuring protection against identity thefts…. Read more »
It’s been so long, I had been involved with multiple Smartcard/PKI projects particularly supporting integration of Sun technologies for use with National eID, US Federal (HSPD-12 / PIV cards) and DoD CAC projects. There is no secret sauce, but unfortunately I did’nt find time to put together a trustworthy documentation addressing the technical aspects of using Smartcard based PKI credentials… Read more »
Last night, I had the opportunity to present at an OWASP event @Hartford, CT. James McGovern, a long-time buddy of mine organized this event at one of the Hartford skyscrappers – What a great view ! I had contributed code artifacts to OWASP projects before, but it was the first time I had a chance to attend an OWASP event…. Read more »
A month ago, I had a chance to meet with John Beveridge (Deputy State Auditor at Office of the State Auditor of Massachusetts) at an ISACA event in Boston. During a casual chat, he briefly mentioned about the upcoming regulation highlighting “Mass 201 CMR 17.00 – Massachusetts Standards for Data Protection of Personal Information” and it’s compelling security requirements ! … Read more »
It’s been a while, I had been hearing a lot of talk about unified biometric credentials and using then for convergence of physical and logical access control systems – Like me, you might’ve heard a lot of high-level marketing or analyst’s stuff … so here is some realities from my hands-on experience ! Frankly, there is no magic silver bullet… Read more »
It’s been a while, MD5 has been known for its several weaknesses and multiple proven attack scenarios showing how it can be compromised – For those known reasons, a lot of us try our best to stay away from using MD5. Last week at the Chaos Communication Congress Conference – Berlin a bunch of researchers disclosed this eye-raising MD5 collision… Read more »
A picture is worth a thousand words. This picture is intended for a friend of mine (a doubting Thomas), who did’nt believe my latest work on enabling a multi-factor authentication based “Web SSO” that uses on-card credentials (PIN + PKI + Biometrics) using PIV card. This solution is currently tested to run Sun OpenSSO Enterprise 8 (running on Glassfish v2),… Read more »