Jericho Systems Corporation
News & Events

Wednesday, June 6, 2005
U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) Selects Jericho Systems' EnterSpace Security Suite to demonstrate next-generation information sharing for War Fighters.

Jericho Systems' Privilege Management Solution Combined with the DoD's Digital Identity Enables War Fighters to Access the Right Information at the Right Time to Accomplish Their Mission.

Jericho Systems Corporation, the leading provider of next-generation, fine-grained decisioning solutions for security, personalization, and business process automation, today announced that the U.S. Department of Defense Public Key Infrastructure Program Management Office (DoD PKI PMO), housed at the National Security Agency (NSA), has selected the EnterSpace Security Suite (ESS) to demonstrate a next-generation, privilege management approach that uses the DoD digital identity as the foundation for flexible and responsive access control.

Since 9/11, enhancing information sharing in the federal government, including the DoD, Department of Homeland Security, and other federal agencies, has been a top priority. Human lives both at home and abroad are impacted by the ability to securely share information. Soldiers on the front lines of the war against terrorism need relevant information at the right time to accomplish their mission. The ESS is designed to make the real-time, run-time security authorization decisions that enable the right people to have access at the right time. This authorization capability will be a key component of the next-generation, Global Information Grid Information Assurance (GIG IA) architecture for the DoD.

Utilizing realistic operational scenarios that stress information sharing and security demands on war fighters and mission operators, Jericho Systems' project with the DoD illustrates the innovative features of an attribute-based authorization service provided by the ESS. Information from existing PKI credentials embedded on the DoD Common Access Card (CAC) is used by the ESS to obtain user attributes from trusted directories or databases. A rules-based authorization decision, enriched by these and other relevant attributes, is then made to realize discretionary (or "need-to-know") access control, aligned with; rather than serving as a barrier to, the time-sensitive, operational decision making processes of modern business and modern warfare. This meets the goals of "assured information sharing" in the DoD Global Information Grid … providing the right information, to the right users, at the right time. The "need-to-know" is being transformed into a "need-to-share." The ESS enables this transformation by considering changes in the operational environment, changes in the user attributes, and/or changes in the rules at the time a sharing decision is required.

Gil Nolte, Director of the DoD PKI PMO, indicates that "a privilege management infrastructure, based on commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) products such as the Jericho Systems' EnterSpace Security Suite, could have the ability to enable the DoD to unleash the power of a digital identity." These advanced building block capabilities reduce the operational burden associated with managing user credentials and provide a scalable and cost-effective alternative to traditional methods of access control such as Access Control Lists. The ESS also affords the DoD community an efficient means to utilize groups, roles, citizenship and other attributes to create "real-time" communities of interest and make "right now" access control decisions.

Brynn Mow, Chief Executive Officer of Jericho Systems stated that "we are incredibly excited about the potential of Jericho Systems to improve information sharing capabilities in the pubic and private sector. Since the company was founded in August of 2002, Jericho Systems has been dedicated to developing rules-based, decisioning software that enhances the capabilities of the real-time enterprise. The goal of the ongoing project with the DoD is to demonstrate the effectiveness of Jericho Systems' next-generation approach to privilege management and validate the ability of these COTS products to provide an Authorization Service throughout the DoD. We are one of the few vendors in the market that provides such granularity and flexibility, while still adhering to open standards."

About Jericho Systems
Jericho Systems Corporation provides next-generation, rules-based decisioning tools for security, personalization and business process automation solutions. In the security arena, Jericho Systems offers the EnterSpace Security Suite (ESS) as an open standards based, authorization "service" capable of existing within a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA).

Jericho Systems is dedicated to the prospect that the future of the software industry is based upon non-proprietary, open standards based interfaces such as SAML, XACML, WS-Security and SOAP. Proprietary "lock-in" will not be tolerated by the purchaser of next-generation enterprise software.

The ESS affords Fortune 1000 corporations and government entities the opportunity to secure resources with incredible flexibility and next-generation granularity using attributes. This next-generation granularity and agility will become a business necessity as Web Services and Grid Computing implementations mature. Moreover, the ESS removes many hidden provisioning and administration costs inherent in the Role Based Access Control model by introducing Attribute Based Access Control (ABAC).

Jericho Systems Corporation is based in Dallas, Texas. The company provides "Tools that Rule™".

For more information, visit http://www.jerichosystems.com