The eighth annual RSA Data Security Conference winds up on Thursday January 21, at which point the flood of announcements from security vendors should finally dry up. Points to note included newcomer Celo Communications’ introduction of a public key infrastructure (PKI) called CeloCom Enterprise; VeriSign, which expanded its global PKI backbone and released OnSite Key Manager; Entrust, which unveiled open PKI initiatives and a global service provider strategy to move product; Bull, which added support for standards-based PKI to its AccessMaster software; and Check Point, which unveiled a turnkey PKI. As you might guess from this roundup, public key infrastructures were the dominant note of the product announcements, but there were a couple of honorable exceptions. Rainbow Technologies introduced a USB-based authentication token called the I-Key, which works like a smart card but is cheaper, while a small UK company called ID Arts launched something genuinely different. Working on theories in cognitive science which hold that the human brain has special capacity dedicated to remembering faces and nothing else, ID Arts has built a system to replace forgettable passwords and PINs with a sequence of pictures of faces. It sounds odd but it demos well, and Barclays Bank has bought the concept far enough to conduct a large-scale pilot.
