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October 2004 • Volume 9 Number 10 |
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Executive Director's Letter Dear members and friends of the Alliance, For those of you who were expecting to receive this newsletter earlier in the month, my apologies. With so much happening the week prior to our Annual Conference and the week of the conference, something had to slip. Hopefully we will get back on schedule next month. It is hard to capture in the limited space in this letter all that took place during last week’s 2004 Fall Annual Conference in San Francisco. The program committee delivered another first-rate conference agenda and all of the executive-level speakers from commercial and government markets and those in the industry did a fantastic job in delivering on our theme of “evolution through innovation.” The hotel ballroom was filled to capacity on Monday morning to listen to Richard Clarke, former senior security advisor to the past four presidents, address the smart card industry in his keynote address. He demonstrated a clear understanding of the core principles of why stronger identification needs to be a priority for our country and challenged the smart card industry to lead the effort to educate the public that you can have strong identification and maintain individual privacy and civil liberties. The next morning, we witnessed first-hand the tremendous power of strong authentication in a connected and wireless world. Bill Vass, newly appointed CIO at Sun Microsystems, demonstrated a radically different business and personal relationship to computing – enabled by the power of smart card technology. The speakers and panels that followed the keynotes reinforced those major themes and revealed the future of the industries we serve and the technologies we support. The conference program concluded, appropriately enough, with a Next Generation Technology Fair that included ten emerging technology and solutions firms demonstrating innovation on a range of applications from biometrics, health care, enterprise security, payments, and secure credentials.
Member Profile 1. What are Atmel's main business profile and offerings?
Securing Logical Access: Smart Cards and Strong Authentication Virtually every day another news story highlights the importance of network security - corporate networks are breached, databases are accessed by unauthorized individuals, and identities are stolen and used to conduct fraudulent transactions. As a result, both businesses and governments are evaluating or implementing new identity management systems to provide more secure logical access. Logical access is the process by which individuals are permitted to use computer systems and the networks to which these systems are attached. The objective of secure logical access is to ensure that these devices and networks, and the services they provide, are available only to those individuals who are entitled to use them. Entitlement is typically based on some sort of predetermined relationship between the network or system owner and the user, as a paying subscriber, an employee, a customer, or some other type of binding relationship.
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Executive
Director's Letter
