Identity Engines Upgrades, Partners

LAS VEGAS -- Identity Engines, a leading provider of identity-centric network access management solutions, today announced version 4.0 of its award-winning Ignition Server™, the industry’s first solution to integrate both policy-driven identity management with posture and health monitoring to ensure only the right people and the right devices access the network. In a separate release today, the company announced that it has added posture integration to Ignition Server through a partnership with OPSWAT (see “IDENTITY ENGINES EXTENDS REACH INTO NAC MARKET THROUGH OPSWAT OEM”).

In addition, the company also announced Ignition Posture Module for Xsupplicant that will include integration with NAC and with Ignition AutoConnect™, a new product that delivers the ability for the supplicant to contact the customer’s server to configure and update itself. Identity Engines is attending this year’s Interop in Las Vegas, May 21-25, booth #1014.

To deliver the client-side component, Identity Engines is basing its efforts on the power of an open source client platform being developed by the OpenSEA Alliance. The open platform will allow the company to address both general supplicant usability issues by contributing development to an existing client, as well as add additional value in NAC integration (network-node validation) through strategic partnership OPSWAT.

The OpenSEA Alliance is a newly formed group dedicated to the development, promotion, and distribution of an open source 802.1X supplicant. The name OpenSEA stands for "Open Secure Edge Access" and reflects the group’s focus on open source solutions for networking and security. As its initial project, the OpenSEA Alliance is developing a robust cross-platform open source 802.1X supplicant (VPN client). The group’s goal is to deliver an open source 802.1X supplicant that models the popular Firefox web browser in that it will be extremely reliable, widely distributed, and readily available.

"This release addresses a ubiquitous need that we’ve seen in the educational market, that of inadequate and over-priced supplicants. Ignition Posture Module for Xsupplicant is the result of a commitment to delivering the solutions education needs today," said J. Peter Selda, CEO of Identity Engines. "Identity Engines is continuing to drive 802.1X adoption by providing an easy-to-use supplicant while also addressing the current troubleshooting and protocol incompatibility challenges that the education market is facing. Identity Engines has built a team of the world’s foremost 802.1X experts and co-founded the OpenSEA Alliance in order to pool the resources and talents of leading security companies to create the most robust open-source 802.1X supplicant."

“Last year I noted the need for an expanded definition of NAC solution that includes the following capabilities: host-posture checking; quarantine and remediation; identity aware and policy-based authentication and resource access control; and post-admission threat protection, quarantine and remediation,” said Andrew Braunberg, Senior Analyst, Information Security, at Current Analysis. “Identity Engines has also recognized the need for a more unified approach to NAC and has been an early advocate of adding identity awareness to traditional NAC solutions.”

Within the larger access control context, device posture continues to grow as a business need. Industry estimates indicate that between 30-60% of enterprises already have deployed, or are in the process of deploying NAC within the enterprise.

In a separate release:

LAS VEGAS -- Identity Engines, a leading provider of identity-centric network access management solutions, and OPSWAT, the leading provider of endpoint security integration technologies, today announced an OEM agreement to embed the OPSWAT OESIS™ framework into Identity Engines Ignition Server™. The integration creates the industry’s first NAC-aware policy engine able to evaluate device posture within the context of identity for network authentication and authorization decisions.

The integrated offering is able to efficiently protect networks against access by unauthorized individuals, by an individual to unauthorized services, or by any authorized or unauthorized device that might represent a potential vulnerability due to out-of-compliance endpoint protection. Leveraging this capability, a corporation can enforce device health checks on all company-owned laptops, thereby re-directing non-compliant devices to a remediation VLAN before allowing them to connect to the network. Guests requesting access to the same network would not be subjected to the same endpoint check because their connection could be restricted to Internet access.

In a separate release today, Identity Engines announced version 4.0 of its award-winning Ignition Server with posture integration (see “IDENTITY ENGINES HARNESSES USER, POSTURE AND POLICY IN END-TO-END 802.1X SOLUTION”). Identity Engines is exhibiting at this year’s Interop in Las Vegas, May 22-24, booth #1014.

“OPSWAT is pleased to partner with Identity Engines by providing technologies to assess the security state of applications installed on endpoints,” said Benny Czarny, CEO of OPSWAT. “This is a proven framework among the industry’s most well-known security brands, but the partnership with Identity Engines represents an advanced approach to managing network security by basing access control on a correlation of the user’s identity, connection type and endpoint security state.”

“No other product in the marketplace today offers a flexible policy engine that combines both an identity and a posture solution; prospects have indicated strong interest in our approach,” said J. Peter Selda, CEO of Identity Engines. “Partnering with OPSWAT allows our customers to benefit from the same technology that powers the NAC solutions from some of the largest companies in the industry including Cisco, Juniper, and Symantec.”

Identity Engines Inc.