Experiences at IDTrust 2008 at NIST

It was a great feeling to actually stand in an auditorium with lights and make a presentation. The occasion was IDTrust2008 workshop. The location was National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) at Gaithersburg, Maryland.

Dee Schur from Oasis and I had worked for 4 months to put together the best folks in the Security industry (of course Oasis members) to make a good case for XACML and the interoperability at the RSA Conference 2008. To summarize, the panel was a grand success. :)

The panelists included Hal Lockhart from BEA Systems (Co-chair of XACML and SAML TCs), Tony Nadalin from IBM (Tony is the Chief Security Architect/Distinguished Engineer), Sunil Madhu (Chief Architect, Policy Management BU at Cisco), Andreas (Product Manager from Axiomatics) and of course, your excellency.

You can get hold of the presentations from the program page.



From left to right: Hal Lockhart, Co-Chair, Oasis SAML and XACML TCs; Sunil Madhu, Chief Architect, Policy Management Business Unit, Cisco System; Anil Saldhana, Red Hat; Tony Nadalin, Distinguished Engineer and Chief Security Architect, IBM and Andreas S, Axiomatics.

It certainly was an honor to talk to David Ferraiolo, Researcher at NIST for almost 20 minutes after the panel. Well I did not know exactly who David was (I was guessing it in my mind during my talk with him, since he mentioned that he is researching access control for a long long time. My guess was right). Well, David is one of the guys who invented RBAC in 1992. RBAC has been the foundation of access control in many security systems including Java EE security. So, after Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Kim Cameron, David is the third superstar I have met in the space of 12 months. :)

It was a pleasure to listen to Stephen Wilson's presentation on PKI as well as Arshad Noor rave about EKMI. I also had the pleasure of meeting Dr.Abbie Barbir from Nortel. Abbie is a old horse in the standards space. He is on the Technical Advisory Board (TAB) of Oasis. He co-chairs the TAB with Hal as per Oasis TAB.

Abbie, Hal and Tony certainly have a great sense of humor, which may really kill you. Particularly stay away from Abbie and Tony.

Looking forward to the Oasis XACML Interoperability at RSA Conference 2008.