IBM introduces 10 Gigabit blade switch
IBM announced the release of a 10-Gigabit Ethernet blade switch.
IBM is unveiling the Nortel 10G Uplink Ethernet Switch Module for BladeCenter, providing increased performance for applications with high bandwidth demands, such as video on demand, Internet protocol television (IPTV) and other mission-critical real-time applications. The switch is designed to work in BladeCenter, BladeCenter H and BladeCenter T systems.
The switch has a number of features, including three 10-Gigabit uplink ports with an aggregate throughput of 90 Gbps full duplex and offers enhanced security with Layer 2 and Layer 3 filters, as well as improved quality of service through traffic queue prioritization.
The Nortel 10G Uplink Ethernet Switch Module for BladeCenter is available from IBM, priced starting at $6,099.
Novell offers identity management solution
Novell announced the creation of Bandit, an open source project designed to unify identity systems and provide a consistent approach to securing and managing identity. The identity services in development by the Bandit community are open source and will work with existing industry standards such as WS- and Liberty Federation and open source projects, including Eclipse Higgins.
By developing an open source enablement layer, Novell and the Bandit community will make it possible to standardize identity management across differing systems and resources. Bandit’s freely available code can then be overlayed on an existing identity management system.
The Bandit project is focused on delivering a single, consistent experience of digital identity and includes several common identity services such as authentication, roles, policy and compliance.
Novell already incorporates some of Bandit’s open identity services within its SUSE Linux distribution and plans to include Bandit’s identity services in future releases of other products.
Elcomsoft Distributed Password Recovery unlocks digital signature certificates
Elcomsoft has added Personal Information Exchange certificate support to Elcomsoft Distributed Password Recovery. The program offers administrators a solution for recovering passwords to MS Office documents when employees forget their passwords, or when they deliberately add passwords.
The latest version can recover passwords from the Personal Information Exchange certificates that are used for digital signatures and encryption, including PKCS number 12 files with .PFX and .P12 extensions. Personal Information Exchange certificates usually contain a public key and optionally, a private key. The public key is used for encryption and verification of the signature, while the private key is used for decryption and signing. If the password-protected private key is present, it can only be recovered with a brute force attack. Because brute force decryption takes a long time, Elcomsoft’s Distributed Password Recovery offers an alternative solution.
Distributed Password Recovery installs agents onto as many computers on the network as the user desires. Each of these agents uses brute force to try to recover the lost password. The program ensures that these agents work together and combine their computing power to find the lost password. The more computing power available, the faster the recovery speed.
Another module of the program, the Console, is designed to manage the agents. This solution is best for big enterprises with thousands of clients, when employees leave without un-protecting their mission-critical documents.
The software has a plug-in architecture and can be extended to support more document formats and types of encryption.
Elcomsoft Distributed Password Recovery version 1.2.39 runs under Windows NT4/2000/XP/2003 and requires 5MB of hard disk space on the server and 3MB on every client. Prices start at US$599 for networks with up to 20 clients.
