PDA and wireless security hot topic at RSA

Companies offering products to secure content stored on wireless devices were out in force at this year's RSA Conference in San Francisco, underscoring the increased urgency with which companies are addressing the security threats posed by mobile workers.

Security technology for mobile devices ran the gamut from hardware appliances that lock down wireless networks to secure PINs (personal identification numbers) and VPN (virtual private network) software targeted at cellular phones and handheld PDAs (personal digital assistants).

These are among the products on display at the conference, which runs through Thursday at the Moscone Center:

-- Pointesec Mobile Technologies Inc. announced Pointsec for Pocket PC 2.0, a software application that encrypts data stored on Microsoft Corp.'s Pocket PC 2002 PDA.

Pointsec for Pocket PC 2.0 can encrypt data stored on the PDA device, including files used by Microsoft's Outlook or Pocket Word applications. The software can also protect PDA data stored in removable media such as microdrives, multimedia Cards (MMCs), and secure digital cards, according to Pointsec, which is part of Protect Data AB of Stockholm.

-- Aventail Corp. of Seattle displayed a new version of its OnDemand VPN agent for the PocketPC platform. Customers using Aventail's Anywhere Secure Access Policy (ASAP) platform will be able to use the company's SSL (secure sockets layer) VPN technology to authenticate and encrypt communications sent from applications running on a PocketPC, including Microsoft's Pocket Outlook e-mail software, Aventail said.

-- Renesas Technology America Inc. offered a different option for securing data on mobile devices. The San Jose, California, company's PIN Secure MultiMediaCard is a standard seven-pin MMC card outfitted with PKI (Public Key Infrastructure) encryption and DRM (digital rights management) as well as a tamper resistant module for data storage.

The SecureMMC card can be used to secure file-level data on PDAs and cellular phones that accept the MMC cards. Files are stored on the PDA in encrypted form. License keys and a PIN to access those keys are stored in the SecureMMC card's tamper resistant module, Renesas said.

-- On the WLAN (wireless LAN) front, Funk Software Inc. demonstrated its Odyssey Server v1.1 and Steel-Belted Radius v4.0 servers. The latest versions of those products from Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Funk now feature WLAN security management and integration features.

Odyssey v1.1 is intended for smaller offices or autonomous wireless networks within larger organizations. The latest version of the product adds the ability to authenticate WLAN users against a non-Windows authentication database, such as one based on SQL/LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol), or a token authentication system such as RSA Security Inc.'s ACE Server.

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