Industry Consortium Rivalry over Crypto Standards

Feb 21, 2009, 06:02 (0 Talkback[s])
(Other stories by Nils Magnus)

[ Thanks to Britta Wuelfing for this link. ]

"In the spirit of the Tanenbaum bromide that the good thing about standards is that there are so many of them, Sun Microsystems has now offered direct access to its own cryptology recommendation. Naturally Sun is also promoting a vendor-independent, generic and open source approach. Its answer is the Crypto KMS Agent Toolkit under a BSD license that, unfortunately, can only be compiled with Sun Studio 12. According to Jason Schaffer, senior director of storage product management at Sun, "Open Storage solutions allows customers to break free from the chains of proprietary hardware... [in this] highly fragmented encryption market." The Sun solution involves "a number of additional partners" such as EMC's RSA Security division proposing a unified standard to the IEEE 1619.3 Working Group.

"But the two competing standards groups are still not cooperating. In fact, a ChannelWeb article says that they're unprepared to do so. Both entities say alternately that each is welcome to participate in each other's work."

Complete Story

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