Novell Enables Rapid Adoption of Identity Management by Open Sourcing Key Technologies

WALTHAM, Mass. – June 12, 2006 – Novell today announced the creation of BanditTM, a groundbreaking open source project with a charter to unify disparate identity systems and provide a consistent approach to securing and managing identity. The identity services in development by the Bandit community are open source and will work with existing industry standards such as WS- * and Liberty Federation, and open source projects including Eclipse Higgins. Novell has already contributed significant engineering resources and code to jump start this effort. Ultimately, the goal of the Bandit project is to provide organizations with a consistent approach to enterprise identity management challenges such as secure, role-based access and regulatory compliance reporting.

“The Bandit project is looking to address one of the toughest challenges in identity management today – provide a consistent approach to securing and managing identity,” said Mike Neuenschwander, vice president and research director for the Burton Group. “The creation of identity services that abstract the complexity of identity systems and that are interoperable and freely available is a worthwhile goal and represents an important inflection point in the ongoing development of the identity management market.”

While many organizations deploy identity management technologies today, disparate vendor solutions can create complexity and potentially slow adoption. By developing an open source enablement layer, Novell and the Bandit community will make it possible to standardize identity management across differing systems and resources. Bandit’s freely available code can then be overlayed on an existing identity management system.

The Bandit project is focused on delivering a single, consistent experience of digital identity and includes several common identity services such as authentication, roles, policy and compliance:

• The Common Authentication Services Adapter (CASA) provides interoperable authentication that enables application and enterprise single sign-on with a secure vault for user and system credentials.
• The Common Identity service is an implementation of the Higgins framework for representing digital identity.
• The Role Engine service can be integrated into any application to consistently calculate role information and unify authorization across systems.
• The Audit Record Framework service provides an open auditing and compliance API and receives audit records from Bandit’s open identity services and other applications to provide common identity and event information to verify security and compliance.

Novell already incorporates some of Bandit’s open identity services within its SUSE® Linux distribution and plans to include Bandit’s identity services in future releases of other products. Novell will continue to support the Bandit project with substantial engineering resources and will maintain the project while the Bandit community grows.

“The Bandit project was created in response to our customers’ need to reduce the complexity of identity management in the enterprise,” said Jeff Jaffe, executive vice president and chief technology officer for Novell. “The industry needs to come together and deliver common identity services that provide a consistent experience, regardless of the underlying infrastructure. Novell’s initial sponsorship of the Bandit project is a natural extension of our leadership in both identity and open source, and we are gratified to see the groundswell of community support.”

A Community-driven Approach to Enterprise Identity Management

The Bandit project builds upon the participation of the broader identity and open source communities and many industry leaders are expressing their support and commitment to the goals of the Bandit project.

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Dominic Fedronic, chief technology officer for ActivIdentity Inc., said, “The deployment of digital identity assurance and strong authentication solutions for both government and enterprise would greatly benefit from seamless interoperability and tight integration with identity management systems. ActivIdentity supports Novell’s leadership with the Bandit project and Higgins as we believe the resulting open industry standards will expand the market and deliver greater value to customers.”

Paul Trevithick, technology lead for the Higgins project at the Eclipse Foundation, said, “We are very pleased that Novell is promoting the adoption of open source identity technologies and that the Bandit project is contributing to and leveraging Higgins. Bandit is providing an important service by making an open identity infrastructure available on enterprise platforms including SUSE Linux.”

Anthony Nadalin, Distinguished Engineer and Chief Security Architect for IBM, said, “IBM is pleased that Novell is using Higgins as the Identity Management foundation for the Bandit project. As a leading proponent of open source, IBM is committed to working with the Eclipse Higgins community to solve the identity-related challenges our customers face everyday.”

George Goodman, president of the Liberty Alliance management board and director, Platform Capabilities Lab at Intel, said, “Liberty Alliance welcomes open initiatives that bring the industry closer to achieving a ubiquitous interoperable privacy-respecting identity layer for the Internet. We salute the Bandit team for contributing open source that will help advance the deployment of Liberty-enabled federations and Web services on the widest possible scale.”

Kim Cameron, architect of Identity and Access for Microsoft, said: “The Identity Metasystem provides a model for identity interoperability across the industry. We’re happy to see Novell playing an active role in helping realize the Identity Metasystem and look forward to working with them to ensure interoperability between our respective products.”

Jim Gerken, practice manager for identity management with Novacoast, said, “We have spent years connecting disparate authentication repositories which confirms the need for consistent and standard identity services. With Novell’s leadership in identity and open source, Bandit is a natural community for Novell to create that leverages its position in both markets.”

Bob Lord, Red Hat senior director engineering, said, “Red Hat supports open source initiatives to build stronger identity frameworks and controls based on open standards. The Bandit project provides several initiatives that will help simplify identity management in heterogeneous environments and drive further innovation for the enterprise. We look forward to working with the open source community to extend a flexible identity framework from desktop to server, network to application.”
Sara Gates, vice president of Identity Management at Sun Microsystems, said, “As a co-founder of the Liberty Alliance and a leading champion of open source, we have seen firsthand how customers are embracing open source technologies as a way to accelerate business solutions and reduce their costs. We strongly support the move of identity management services into the open source community.”

Dick Hardt, Sxip Identity founder and CEO, said, “The identity management industry needs a common approach to secure, role-based access and compliance reporting for the enterprise and open source projects like Bandit from Novell and Higgins are a great step in that direction. We see this as a natural compliment to the user-centric Identity 2.0 efforts being made with SXIP and DIX and are excited to work with them on adding support of Bandit, Higgins and eDirectoryTM.”

Rob Clyde, Symantec vice president of technology, office of the CTO, said, “Symantec is a strong supporter of open source initiatives that enable developer communities and vendors to work together to create flexible solutions capable of meeting the diverse needs of our customers. Companies today face a tremendous challenge as they try to integrate disparate application systems and security infrastructures each with its own authentication technologies into a cohesive, manageable solution. A standards-based approach backed by an open source implementation is a beneficial step towards addressing the vexing problem of identity management.”

Jonathan Alexander, Trusted Network Technologies vice president of engineering, said, “Bandit is addressing key customer challenges, such as integrating distributed identity and roles, that we see as we help customers deploy our identity security and audit solutions. We see the Bandit and Higgins projects as filling a critical need to tie disparate identity systems together into a more pervasive, integrated and powerful solution.”