The Symas Blog
Adding Contextual Information to the RBAC Decision
We don’t have to throw the baby out with the bathwater. RBAC has many good aspects that we’d like to preserve. It’s standards-based, meaning various implementations should interoperate. It works, and is already in place, pretty much everywhere. But we’d like to be able to sprinkle in a bit of context, allowing us to fix the role explosion problem, without breaking its interoperability, or bringing in another implementation, with yet another protocol.
read moreThe Not-So-Bright Future of Directory Services in Red Hat Enterprise Linux
389-ds and Red Hat Directory Server are being touted as Red Hat’s LDAP server solutions on future versions of their OS, but the fine print has some surprises.
read moreConfiguring Apache Fortress-OpenLDAP for High Availability
This post describes how Apache Fortress and OpenLDAP can be placed into a highly-available configuration. Apache Fortress provides Identity and Access Management APIs over HTTP using either JSON or REST formats. OpenLDAP is where the data is stored and maintained.
read moreYour Facebook Account is Worth 2FA But Your Own Network Isn’t?
50% of networks and websites that aren’t using 2FA are open to shared-password attacks. Is yours one of them? How many of the users in your network use the same password on external sites with questionable security? Ondrej Kuznik offers insight on how OpenLDAP users can implement 2FA today. Click to learn how.
read moreHow-To Guide: Two-Factor Authentication
Passwords, everyone loves to hate them and still, in the era of digital certificates, fingerprints, and voice recognition, we use them on a daily basis and want users to memorize tens of different complex passwords. So they cheat and passwords get reused, written down on a piece of paper, you name it. Not that service providers always get this right either.
read moreOpenLDAP for Linux Support from Symas Corporation
Symas corporation to now offer OpenLDAP for Linux Support Packages for any 3rd party distribution. Click to learn more.
read moreLarge University Switches to Symas OpenLDAP, Sees Immediate Success
Through the years that followed, despite university staff turnover and other changes, they have retained Symas to provide “additional brain power,” staff training and software maintenance.
read moreThe Apache Directory Project announces the 8th release of Fortress
The Apache Directory Project announces version 2.0.1 of Apache Fortress Apache Fortress is a computer security access management facility written in Java. Other platforms use the Apache Fortress Rest component. Fortress provides a fine-grained authorization security...
read more3 Turn Productions applauds service from Symas
In 2013 the president of Three Turn Productions, Judy Tyrer, reached out to the Symas Corporation for database help as she was preparing to launch her virtual roleplaying game, called Ever, Jane. The support she received then, and now, has been unrivaled. Click to learn how Symas helped her company.
read moreHoward Chu Shares What to Expect with OpenLDAP 2.5
Howard Chu is the Chief Technology Officer at Symas, the Chief Architect of the OpenLDAP Project, and an overall amazingly entertaining fiddle player (Google it.) This spring Howard spoke at FLOSS UK about the upcoming release of OpenLDAP 2.5. Tom Yates compiled a nice article summarizing these highlights. Click to read.
read moreOracle Lays off Mission Control Team after Open Sourcing Product
Earlier this week, Slashdot carried a story about Oracle Open Sourcing a product line as an opportunity to let the developers go. This is a story-line we have been watching for years.
read moreA message from our President regarding Red Hat and SuSE removing OpenLDAP from their Linux Distributions
A few weeks ago, one of our strategic partners—a large European government and defense contractor—requested a call to discuss a big concern: the OpenLDAP server was slated to be removed from upcoming releases of Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux distributions.
read moreNew Release: Symas OpenLDAP 2.4.45-4
Symas is continuously striving to provide our customers with excellent products. This on-going pursuit leads us to offer the new Production release of Symas OpenLDAP, Gold 2.4.45-4. Current customers, please visit the Downloads page to download Symas OpenLDAP Gold...
read morePreventing Remote Code Execution Exploits in Java
We all know there’s not a foolproof way to secure computing systems. But there are steps that can mitigate the risk of exposure once the inevitable breach occurs.
read moreNew Release: Symas OpenLDAP 2.4.45-2
Symas is continuously striving to provide our customers with excellent products. This on-going pursuit leads us to offer the new Production release of Symas OpenLDAP, Gold 2.4.45-2. Current customers, please visit the Downloads page to download Symas OpenLDAP Gold...
read moreNew Release: Symas OpenLDAP 2.4.45-1 Available
Symas is continuously striving to provide our customers with excellent products. This on-going pursuit leads us to offer the new Production release of Symas OpenLDAP, Gold 2.4.45-1. Current customers, please visit https://downloads.symas.com to download Symas OpenLDAP...
read moreApacheCon 2017: Symas Teams with Evolveum on Identity Governance Talk at ApacheCon
How to Govern and Maintain Compliance Using Open Source Identity Management Components - Katarina Valalikova, Evolveum & Shawn McKinney, Symas Corporation As platform usages continue to expand, so too will the number of identities, which corresponds with a need to...
read moreMusing on the Future of Computing
Symas has set the pace in the database world with LMDB. The efficiency gains from LMDB's Single Level Store approach make LMDB's performance unmatched by any other technology. LMDB's approach is also ideally positioned to leverage future developments in memory and...
read moreSymas OpenLDAP 2.4.44-5 Available
Symas is continuously striving to provide our customers with excellent products. This on-going pursuit leads us to offer the newest Production release of Symas OpenLDAP. For the first time, Symas OpenLDAP 2.4.44-5 is available for Debian 8 and Ubuntu 16. This release...
read moreNo case studies on ABAC?
Don't get me wrong, everyone needs at least RBAC, but it has limitations and doesn't work well with instance data in the authorization expression. This perceived need leads me to look for case studies describing large-scale deployments of ABAC. For example I'd like to...
read moreWe Can Stop Looking For That Panacea Now
It seems every year there's a new protocol for handling security. I was first sucked down into this black hole in the '90's. Few standards back then. Now, so many years and protocols have passed... https auth, x.509 auth, CSIv2, spnego, liberty, saml, ws-*, xacml,...
read moreAhem, it’s called Role-Based Access Control
Of late, on a quest, to educate the info sec community, the definition of RBAC. Not the first time. A couple years back, this role-infused rant: Using Roles for Access Control is Not Role-Based Access Control And before that this: An Introduction to Role-Based...
read moreApache Fortress Role Engineering Tutorial
The goals of this tutorial are to Gain understanding of the Role Based Access Control (RBAC) standard Learn the repeatable steps of the Role Engineering Process Learn about using the Apache Fortress RBAC engine To get started, follow the instructions in the...
read moreApache Fortress End-to-End Security Tutorial
The tutorial provides a how-to guide for applying end-to-end security enforcement across a sample Java Web environment using Java EE, Spring and Apache Fortress security. Requirements covered include authentication, authorization and confidentiality. Both declarative...
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