Novell Helps Business Partners Securely Share Identity Information on the Web

Novell today announced the general availability of the SAML extension for Novell® iChain®, a federated identity management service that allows companies to reach across the Internet to form secure, profitable relationships with business partners and customers. The concept of federated identity - securely sharing user information across organizational or geographic boundaries - is an important part of Novell Nsure™ secure identity management solutions, which not only address identity management within an organization but also beyond the firewall.

"The Internet has long held the promise of better, faster collaboration among business partners or customers; but often, establishing those connections raises serious concerns about security or is simply too complex," said Justin Taylor, Novell's chief strategist for secure identity management.

"The advent of the SAML standard, and now the SAML extension for Novell iChain, changes that," Taylor said. "This new service from Novell allows user identity and attribute information to be shared securely over the Web, addressing a host of business problems - from establishing single sign-on between business partner Web sites to more sophisticated business relationships requiring the secure transmission of credit card information or home phone numbers."

The Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) standard has emerged as the key element in establishing trusted business relationships over the Web. According to Burton Group analyst Phil Schacter, "SAML is becoming a universal token format for applications to leverage a prior authentication event based on an open industry-wide standard. Both Liberty Alliance and the OASIS working group on WS-Security recognize and leverage SAML as part of the infrastructure for Web security. Early adopters are already taking advantage of SAML to deliver business services to partners based on a federated identity approach. By delivering a proxy-based SAML service, Novell is enabling its customers to more rapidly gain the operational and business benefits of federation strategies."

Securing business relationships using the SAML standard also helps lower development and administration costs. Without a standard method of authenticating and authorizing users, organizations would face costly, often non-reusable custom-coding projects. And the SAML extension takes those savings even further, thanks to the proxy-based architecture of Novell iChain. With it, customers can quickly deploy SAML-enabled services without having to make any changes to the actual Web servers.

For customers not currently using the Novell iChain proxy-based architecture, Novell also provides a SAML toolkit that can be used to add SAML capabilities directly to a Web application.

The SAML extension for Novell iChain is available today as a free download to iChain 2.2 customers. It can be downloaded by going to http://download.novell.com. For more information about Novell Nsure secure identity management solutions, go to http://www.novell.com/nsure.