TECHNOLOGY FOR CHANGE

'Facebook' of Devices Will Secure the Mobile Enterprise

Dave Greenfield | Date: 01-04-11 | Comments

As smartphones become standard issue for organizations, they pose a threat to conventional perimeter security defenses. Now a new project from the University of Hannover will protect organizations against those sorts of attacks without requiring significant investment in proprietary hardware.

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'Facebook' of Devices Will Secure the Mobile Enterprise
Compromised smartphones represent a number of significant risks to corporate security. Attackers can not only access private data on those smartphones, but also record user actions on the devices. As smartphones roam onto secure networks, attackers are able to gain access to those secure resources. While PCs users have spent years being educated around cyber-threats, mobile users are still relatively new to the area, making the problem particularly acute.

Now a new project out of the University of Hannover, called Esukom, will attempt to address the issue using a combination of open-source and commercially available security systems. Normally, that sort of coordination would be incredibly expensive if not impossible, but the group will be using a new protocol�the InterFace to Metadata Access Point (IF-MAP)�to facilitate data sharing between the various components.

Standardized by the Trusted Computing Group (TCG), originally IF-MAP was viewed as a part of the TCG security infrastructure, which was perhaps best known for creating Network Access Control (NAC). But IF-MAP use is far greater. With IF-MAP, devices and applications publish information to a common database. Other devices and applications can search for and then subscribe to updates from those devices and applications. The technology effectively creates an internal "Facebook" for networking software and equipment, doing for coordination and collaboration what IP did for communications.

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