Novell Announces Bandit Open Source Project

CGIDir
Wednesday, June 14, 2006; 05:21 AM

Novell announced the creation of Bandit, an open source project with a charter to unify disparate identity systems and provide a consistent approach to securing and managing identity. The identity services in development by the Bandit community are open source and will work with existing industry standards such as WS- * and Liberty Federation, and open source projects including Eclipse Higgins.

Novell has already contributed engineering resources and code to jump start this effort. Ultimately, the goal of the Bandit project is to provide organizations with a consistent approach to enterprise identity management challenges such as secure, role-based access and regulatory compliance reporting.

"The Bandit project is looking to address one of the toughest challenges in identity management today -- provide a consistent approach to securing and managing identity,” said Mike Neuenschwander, vice president and research director for the Burton Group. “The creation of identity services that abstract the complexity of identity systems and that are interoperable and freely available is a worthwhile goal and represents an important inflection point in the ongoing development of the identity management market.”

While many organizations deploy identity management technologies today, disparate vendor solutions can create complexity and potentially slow adoption. By developing an open source enablement layer, Novell and the Bandit community will make it possible to standardize identity management across differing systems and resources. Bandit's freely available code can then be overlayed on an existing identity management system.

The Bandit project is focused on delivering a single, consistent experience of digital identity and includes several common identity services such as authentication, roles, policy and compliance:

    * The Common Authentication Services Adapter (CASA) provides interoperable authentication that enables application and enterprise single sign-on with a secure vault for user and system credentials.
    * The Common Identity service is an implementation of the Higgins framework for representing digital identity.
    * The Role Engine service can be integrated into any application to consistently calculate role information and unify authorization across systems.
    * The Audit Record Framework service provides an open auditing and compliance API and receives audit records from Bandit's open identity services and other applications to provide common identity and event information to verify security and compliance.

Novell already incorporates some of Bandit's open identity services within its SUSE Linux distribution and plans to include Bandit's identity services in future releases of other products. Novell will continue to support the Bandit project with substantial engineering resources and will maintain the project while the Bandit community grows.

“The Bandit project was created in response to our customers' need to reduce the complexity of identity management in the enterprise,” said Jeff Jaffe, executive vice president and chief technology officer for Novell. “The industry needs to come together and deliver common identity services that provide a consistent experience, regardless of the underlying infrastructure. Novell's initial sponsorship of the Bandit project is a natural extension of our leadership in both identity and open source, and we are gratified to see the groundswell of community support.”