"Sun announced that it is open sourcing its encryption
key management technology. The "generic communication protocol
between a key manager and an encrypting device" is the latest
effort in Sun's Open Storage initiative that has been one of the
company's most promising growth areas. The company said the
announcement "sets Sun apart and enables partners to adopt this
protocol to securely handle encryption keys without additional
licensing."
"But the timing of the announcement is a little curious, coming
just days after EMC, HP, IBM and four other companies announced
that they had proposed a standard for encryption key management.
Interoperability between key management systems has been one of the
biggest obstacles to widespread enterprise adoption of data
encryption."