Monday, 17 December 2007
Delivering Value through Speed & Quality
We won two sizeable deals recently -- yahoo! In each, our customers told us they were able to install PingFederate in less time than it took to schedule competing engineers to come on-site to install their products.
Friday, 14 December 2007
Rearden Commerce achieves 45 SAML Connections!
Industry
- Web Commerce
About Rearden Commerce
Rearden Commerce, Inc. provides the first online personal assistant, that helps people quickly find, purchase and manage services for travel planning, dining
reservations, package shipping, web conferencing, event tickets, and more, based on personal preferences and company policies. Rearden Commerce instantly
connects users with over 137,000 merchants, providing the tools people need to access and manage services, like calendar and address book integration, email
invites, and mobile alerts.
Challenge
Scaling infrastructure across the enterprise of a company experiencing 3,000% growth and beyond to 1000+ SMB to Fortune 50 corporate customers
in order to securely share applications
Solution
- PingFederate®
Technical Environment
- Java, running on Linux Blade servers
Benefits
With Federated Identity Management, Rearden Commerce now enables its corporate customers to leverage existing identity systems, maintain control over
credentials, manage all policies and allow users to easily and securely interact with service providers.
Results
- PingFederate deployed in just 2 weeks.
- Within 1 month, federation was complete with fifteen companies, securely supporting 10%-20% of user sessions.
- Management of federation, single sign-on and password management transitioned out of core engineering at a faster than expected pace.
- Activation/configuration groups are now self-sufficient.
Fun with SAML & Google Apps
Hans Zandbelt, who we had recently reported doing some incredible work leveraging PingFederate as an identity router in a "central federation gateway" model over at SURFnet, has done some amazing new things once again!
Yesterday Hans succesfully connected to Google Apps using SAML 2.0 and PingFederate. By doing so, Hans has enabled his SURFnet federation users to connect directly into Google Apps.
During testing, Hans was able to login to Google Apps (SP initiated) with an account from one of his Microsoft ADFS enabled university IDP's.
As Hans puts it, he succesfully "routed identities" from ADFS and A-Select IDPs to SAML 2.0 SPs through PingFederate.
Note that the current routing was "hard-configured 1-to-1". Hans has now to solve how to couple multiple Google App environments dynamically through his central infrastructure to multiple IDPs instead of doing fixed 1-1 routing. Soon, very soon.
Friday, 7 December 2007
Virtual Ping
Close to 40% of all PingIdentians are now located outside of our Denver federation headquarters. We've setup a fairly elaborate virtual environment to support demos and other interactions with those on the front lines and in Boston.
PingIdentians Unite in PingTopia
A customer recently referred to us as "Ping Identitians". The shoe fits. Let's federate!
PingFederate Web Services 2.6 Released - Download Now
New Security Token Service (STS) Adds Support for OASIS WS-Trust 1.3 and SiteMinder SMSESSION Tokens
Ping Identity® today announced PingFederate® Web Services 2.6 is available for immediate download from its Web site, www.pingidentity.com. Now packaged as an optional add-on module for PingFederate, Ping Identity’s industry-leading standalone federated identity software, PingFederate Web Services 2.6 adds support for the OASIS WS-Trust 1.3 standard, as well as the ability to create and validate CA SiteMinder SMSESSION tokens.
PingFederate Web Services, previously called PingTrust, is an optional PingFederate module designed for organizations wanting to extend their browser-based Internet Single Sign-On architecture to incorporate Web services and Service-Oriented Architectures (SOAs). It acts as a WS-Trust Security Token Service (STS), creating and validating security tokens that get bound into SOAP messages to carry user identity information in a standards-based manner.
PingFederate Web Services 2.6 adds support for OASIS WS-Trust version 1.3, the first version of WS-Trust to be published as an official industry standard by OASIS. In addition, it adds the ability to create and validate SMSESSION tokens. With this new capability, SiteMinder-enabled enterprises can create Web service clients and providers that use WS-Trust to issue or validate proprietary SMSESSION tokens, as well as exchange SMSESSION tokens for other token types such as SAML assertions.
Applications depend on user-level identity to protect critical resources, generate audit trails for regulatory compliance and support user-based billing. Before the advent of WS-Trust and Web Services Security (WSS), organizations had to implement proprietary application-level extensions to make the identity of the specific user requesting the execution of a particular Web service available to a Web service provider. Unfortunately, these extensions introduced questionable security. Furthermore, they are impractical in B2B use cases where Web service clients and providers are developed, maintained and operated by different organizations.
“The STS vision was based on the notion that there would be a complete end-to-end, standards-based mechanism for identity-enabled Web services,” said Patrick Harding, CTO of Ping Identity. “Now that WS-Trust is an OASIS standard, our customers can leverage the interoperability inherent in Web services that is not available in proprietary methods.”
Monday, 3 December 2007
New PingFederate SDK
The new PingFederate SDK is intended for application developers and system administrators responsible for extending PingFederate, including development of:
- Authentication adapters needed to integrate Web applications or identity-management systems (whennot already available: see the PingFederate Integration Overview, described under “Additional
- Documentation,” below• Custom data-source drivers
- Interfaces to modify certain runtime-processing behavior
The reader should be familiar with Java software-development principles and practices.
Areas of Customization
- Introduction
- Adapter Interfaces
- Custom Data-Source Interfaces
- Service Customization Interfaces
- Ping Identity Global Client Services
- Getting StartedDirectory StructureSetting Up a Development EnvironmentImplementation Guidelines
- IdP Adapter Implementation
- SP Authentication Adapter Implementation
- Custom Data-Source Implementation
- About the Account-Link Database
- Building and Deploying Your Project
- Logging
Saturday, 1 December 2007
MacHappy
Several friends and former colleague's have been telling me the goodness of Mac's for a few years now. I finally broke down, and don't regret my decision. Neither do our happy engineers.
Ashish Jain with his new MacBook Pro and 30" Cinema Display. All Smiles.
Syndication
Ping Identity Blogs
CTO Talk
By Patrick Harding
Identity in Motion
by Andre Durand
Identity Ticker
by Ashish Jain