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 »
Today is thanksgiving day here in the USA – I am deeply and sorrowfully affected by the time of crisis in my Indian motherland – due to menace of terrorism and cowardice acts practiced in the name of religion. Last night, heavily armed gunmen stormed into hotels, tourist attractions and train stations and carried out attacks on innocent civilians killing… 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 »
The CLOUD computing buzz.. always sounded to me like another hosting infrastructure services that builds on XEN Virtualization services. What it makes more compelling is…. it facilitates on-demand/out-sourced datacenter that scales up and allows us to pay-as-you-go for used services. Couple of months ago, I had a chance to try out my own Amazon EC2 Web services account playing with… Read more »
Couple of days ago, I received the above question from one of our readers. Although I briefly responded to him over email, I really wanted to explore the known traits for defending this vulnerability : HTTP response splitting is a Web application input validation vulnerability that allows to exploit the HTTP headers of a Web application for initiating attacks leading… Read more »
I always had a love and hate interest with using OpenSSL ! But I should agree that it did help me many times…whenever I wanted to quickly test-drive my craziest ideas with PKI certificates. Couple of things I like about OpenSSL is its tools/utilities for testing as equivalent to a commerecial-grade CA and its FIPS-140 compliance. Also, I always get… 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 »
I had multiple opportunities to work on SPML based user-provisioning with Sun Java System Identity Manager. I found SPML as a very compelling standard, it worked as piece-of-cake on Sun IDM that certainly simplified my efforts on representing provisioning requests intended for creating, modifying, canceling, deleting, enabling, disabling, searching user accounts and associated access control privileges with multiple resources. Naturally… Read more »
I received the following question from one of the readers from TechTarget.com: Though I am not a beginner in Java, I recently got interested in Java security. What should I be learning in order to get a job in Java security? Is there anything in particular that could lead me to a career in this area? Here is my response:… Read more »