CA Unveils New Security Management Architecture

The new open-standards framework, dubbed the eTrust Security Management Architecture, will be incorporated into channel-friendly toolkits from CA later this year, said to Bilhar Mann, vice president of product management for identity and access management.

"Eventually we will provide toolkits to partners where they can write to this architecture whenever they wish," Mann said. "Over time, we will build this support into all of our eTrust identity and access management solutions."

Already, CA has readied two of its mainframe products for the new framework. The Islandia, N.Y.-based vendor Tuesday released new versions of its eTrust CA-ACF2 and eTrust CA-Top Secret solutions.

Down the road, CA will extend this security backbone to all of its identity and access management products, Mann said.

By featuring a common security backbone that leverages open standards such as WS-Security, SAML, SPML, ISO-10181, Kerberos, X.509 and SAF, the new architecture enables interoperability between diverse platforms and security mechanisms.

The new framework also will provide "intelligent decision processing," a feature that enables security policies based on point of entry and other variables that may impact the attributes of a specific transaction, as well as "true accountability," which ensures that a user's identity is not lost in a transaction by delivering identity mapping across platform boundaries.

This latter technology, spawned from the nascent log management industry, delivers a complete audit of an identity or access transaction as it moves throughout an organization, and enables solution providers to help customers enforce platform-independent security policies.