There were a couple of recent identity management announcements that I wanted to bring to your attention.

First, just this week, Trustgenix announced the latest version of its lead product. IdentityBridge Standard Edition (SE) makes federated identity accessible to many small and midsize companies. It enables large enterprises to extend single sign-on (SSO) and identity federation to smaller firms that have limited IT resources. A large enterprise can now create a federation hub to connect smaller partners, suppliers, and customers in spoke fashion. This enables the smaller company to securely access the Web applications that the bigger partner makes available to them, at a cost that's reasonable. Get the details at http://www.trustgenix.com/Products/index.html and check out the offerings for both Enterprise edition and Carrier edition at the same time.

I had the opportunity to meet with Nelson Cicchitto, CEO of Avatier, last week. Avatier has been active in logon and password offerings for a few years, but has now added two functions to its Avatier Identity Management Server (AIMS). Joining Password Station, and Password Bouncer will be Account Creator and Account Terminator (for provisioning and deprovisioning). Looming in the not too distant future are Account Requester (rules based self-service provisioning) and Logon Station (enterprise SSO). The highlight of the presentation, for me, was the demonstration of AIMS' double-byte enabled dynamic multilingual properties. Find out more at http://www.avatier.com/ and be sure to try out the demos!

I kept forgetting to talk about TriCypher, a company I spoke to at the RSA conference in February. Its TriCipher Armored Credential System (TACS) supposedly prevents man-in-the-middle phishing attacks (see "The Phishing Guide" http://www.technicalinfo.net/papers/Phishing.html). It's TriCypher's contention that all of the one-time password solutions to phishing are vulnerable to such attacks. TACS creates a multi-part credential, splitting the user's credential between the user and a secure appliance kept in the enterprise's data center. Since the user doesn't have the entire credential, he or she can't give it away to the phisher, nor can the phisher steal it from their desktop. If phishing worries you, you ought to check out TACS (http://www.tricipher.com/products/tacs.html).

Finally, under corrections, extensions and emendations: Persistent Systems has grown to over 1,700 employees (I said 1,200 last week) and to all the PR folk I know and love: Please stop! I've no control over who sits on my panel at Digital ID World, so please stop begging, er, um, pleading, er, um asking to get your guy (or gal) on the dais. 

Dave Kearns is a consultant and editor of IdM, the Journal of Identity Management.