European Identity Award for outstanding projects, innovations and advancements in the field of digital identity management was presented by the analyst group Kuppinger Cole at a festive ceremony at the European Identity Conference 2010, the leading European venue for Identity and Access Management (IAM) and Governance, Risk Management and Compliance (GRC) in Munich.

Awards were given in six categories. Besides the award for "best innovation" in IAM or GRC, the categories include best program or initiative in internal projects, B2B, B2C, Cloud Computing and eGovernment/eHealth.

In the category "Best Innovation", the European Identity Award will be shared by Microsoft and IBM for their solutions "U-Prove" and "Idemix".

The award for "Best Internal Project" was shared by three winners. One award went to $ekerbank T.A.$ of Turkey for a solution developed together with Smartsoft and Oracle for providing risk-based authentication and authorization using neural networks. The second prize was awarded to Hannover Municipal Works for their IAM project based on a product supplied by Voelcker Informatik denoted by full ITIL integration as well as interfaces to a wide range of service and configuration management systems. The third winner is Schenker Deutschland AG, a major logistics company which received the award for a project undertaken in conjunction with ic-Consult and using technology from IBM and which provides an innovative and consistent approach to Web Services.

Three former Sun Microsystems executives have set up shop at an open-source enterprise application software provider called ForgeRock. Former Sun executives Simon Phipps, Lasse Andresen and Hermann Svoren have joined Oslo-based ForgeRock in prominent positions. ForgeRock is the official steward of the ForgeRock I3 Open Platform project.

"The ForgeRock I3 Open Platform provides a secure and integrated application platform comprising premier-quality portal, identity, access and federation management solutions, as well as an Enterprise Service Bus that glues all your enterprise business services together," the company said in a news release May 10. "The I3 Open Platform is built from ... open-source projects including OpenAM (based on OpenSSO), OpenESB, OpenIdM and OpenPortal (based on Liferay Portal)."

Essentially, ForgeRock was formed to fill the void Oracle left when it ended support for Sun's OpenSSO project, company officials said. "OpenSSO is an open-source access management and federation server platform. ... OpenSSO will continue to be developed and supported by ForgeRock under the name of *OpenAM," reads the Wikipedia entry on OpenSSO. "Announced by Sun in July 2005, OpenSSO is based on Sun Java System Access Manager and is the core of Sun's commercial access management and federation product, OpenSSO Enterprise (formerly Sun Access Manager and Sun Federation Manager)."

One key issue that is often overlooked in complex identity implementations is Privileged Access Management. You have an expensive and robust new identity system that handles everything you could have possibly thought of except one thing... auditing and security for the users who implemented the system in the first place. Users like database/directory admins and IDM admins who essentially have "the keys to the kingdom" can login using these accounts leaving no trace of the physical identity behind the virtual super user. Essentially, the most powerful accounts with the greatest potential for damage are in no way controlled or audited by your IdM implementation.

There are many products out there today, which do some pretty amazing things when it comes to Privileged Access Management. Rather than addressing privileged access management as separate problem and solution, AegisUSA has used its expertise and real-world implementation requirements to develop a PAM solution as an add-on for Sun Identity Manager. This approach allows customers to add critical identity functionality to their environment while using their existing skill sets and software licenses. Some of the key features of the AegisUSA PAM product include:

• Identity-based access to privileged accounts allowing for all actions to be traced back to a physical identity
• Role based access control providing limited accessibility to the privileged request process
• Customizable approval before access is granted
• Auditing of all access beginning and end dates as well as request history

All requests for access and approvals are made through the familiar Sun IdM interface. After receiving approval for access, the privileged accounts password is changed and the password is made available to the requestor. No one else is able to log in with this account until the requestor's access time expires or the requestor relinquishes control. The PAM solution is designed to be configured and in production in less than 5 days.

Mozilla has an answer to site-centric identity systems like Facebook's - put the browser in charge of your online logins instead.

Account Manager allows you to log in and out of websites directly through the browser, rather than relying on a particular site's login form. Using a new menu item in the main toolbar - a button with a picture of a key that sits next to the address field - Account Manager lets you pick a login to use at any site you visit. It stores logins you've already created, suggesting them whenever they can be used. It can also generate (and remember) random passwords to make your logins more secure. It's a radical step up from Firefox's current Password Manager feature.

Mozilla's decision to put this new button directly into Firefox's toolbar brings us one step closer to realizing a ubiquitous social network on the web, where you're logged in and connected to your friends wherever you go. All the while, you remain in total control of your own identity since you can tinker with all of your logins and connections through some simple panels in the browser.

There's no word yet on when this will make it into Firefox, but we may see it as soon as Firefox 4, which is due in early 2011. For now, Account Manager is separate add-on you can grab from the Mozilla website. The add-on is still a beta release and there are some known bugs, but in our testing, it performed as advertised.

We released a new patchset for 11g R1 Identity Management - this includes Oracle Virtual Directory, Oracle Internet Directory and Oracle Identity Federation.

This is primarily a bug fix release and is available for download from Support and eDelivery.