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 »
I had been involved with multiple Biometric ISV providers and its integration with Sun technologies particularly OpenSSO, IdM, Sun Rays and Solaris. I also had the opportunity to deploy Biometric solutions to few govt organizations that starts with “D” and “N”. Believe it or not…we have few of them in production. Now, getting down to the specifics – Putting it… 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 »
Biometric smartcards are made compulsory for sea-going fishermen from January 1, 2009, who reside in the Mangalore coast of Karnataka (India). It is very surprising to note this initiative from a local government organization steps up to enhance security and enforcing stronger access control – very pro-active move ! Here is the Story – Biometric attendance system at New Mangalore… Read more »
Last week, I was test driving a PIV Smartcard based PKI as a keystore (via Java PKCS#11) to support using the PKI/certificate credentials for performing encryption/decryption and digital signature operations (PKI based logins to Web applications, Encryption/decryption of documents, Digitally signing email). There is no secret receipe but some of you may find it a bit difficult – if you… Read more »
Last week, I was at the 7th Annual Smart Card in Government Conference and had the opportunity to join a panel on “Personal Identity Verification (PIV) – Technologies” and presented a session entitled “Managing PIV Lifecycle and Converging Physical and Logical Access Control” with emphasis on implementing HSPD-12/FIPS-201 mandates. I thoroughly enjoyed my participation in the conference, particularly the overwhelming … Read more »
Sun Ray Thin Clients has been widely popular in Government applications for a while now. With the introduction of HSPD-12/PIV cards, I had multiple requests from my SI friends asking me to verify whether PIV cards work on SunRays for hotdesking and enabling PKI based authentication. As on today, Sun Ray Session Server 4.0 does’nt officially support PIV cards …particularly… Read more »
Last week, I was at Biometric Consortium Conference 2006 to present “Biometric Single Sign-On using SAML: Architecture and Design Strategies” and demonstrate one of my favorite topic of interest – Stronger authentication solution that combines “Web Access Management/SSO/Federation” using “Biometrics”. I used my previous JAAS Module integration work between Sun Java System Access Manager 6.x (SunONE Identity Server) and BioBex… Read more »
Last 3 weeks, been so hectic…the days were faster than light, I was pulling my-hair-out on a critical proof-of-concept that requires demonstrating Web Single Sign-on (via Sun Java System Access Manager) using PKI/Digital certificate credentials (from Belgian eID) and then enable Smartcard PKI based Desktop authentication/Session Mobility using Sun Rays. The secret sauce on this architecture is using OpenSC PAM… Read more »
Last few months, I was passionately busy working on an interesting project opportunity …to implement a biometric authentication module for a security sensitive J2EE application (Sorry…don’t ask who is the customer :-)). Ofcourse, the target is a die-hard Sun customer who believed on us -not- that armed contractor. They suggested me to use CrossMatch Verifier-E Fingerprint scanner and BioBex middleware… Read more »