RSA Revises Keon PKI Line

RSA Security Inc. on Monday will introduce a major revision of its Keon PKI product line designed to give users greater scalability and enhanced ease-of-use.

Although the market for public key infrastructure (PKI) systems has never really materialized the way vendors thought it would, RSA officials say theyre seeing increased demand for PKI-related applications.

“We still see a strong PKI market and demand and believe that our market share is continuing to grow,” said Brian Breton, product marketing manager for the Keon line at RSA in Bedford, Mass. “We absolutely believe that [market share gain] is at the expense of other vendors” such as Entrust Inc. and Baltimore Technologies plc.

In the Keon Certificate Authority, version 6.0 adds a new back-up feature with 24-hour security for e-business applications. The new version also provides increased integration with hardware security modules that enables keys to be stored and retrieved from such devices.

Keon Security Server 5.6 adds integration with third-party password-management products, enabling the user to get password changes from these products. Meanwhile, Keon Desktop 5.6 now includes support for the Keon CA for the storage of encryption keys.

WebPassport 1.1 comes with a feature that enables users to import their credentials to any vendors PKI system. The overall push with the revision of Keon, Breton said, is to get past the objections that potential users have to PKI systems.

“Its geared toward overcoming the previous hurdles to PKI use,” he said. “People are looking to PKI for specific e-business applications and not just the infrastructure anymore.”