For the last few years, Red Hat has been a regular fixture at the RSA Conference, and this year will be no different. We will be showing the recently open sourced Certificate System Dogtag project and we’ll be launching the beta program for Red Hat Enterprise IPA. Red Hat Enterprise IPA is a new product, scheduled for release mid-year, that is based on the open source freeIPA, centralized Identity, Policy and Audit project. At the Red Hat booth at RSA, we will have a demo showing the high-level features of Red Hat Enterprise IPA, so if you are interested in participating in the beta program please visit us at the show, or sign up for more information about the beta.

Identity and access management is important for reasons of efficiency, risk reduction and compliance. Existing solutions are either no longer compliant (NIS), expensive or not that easy to use (do-it-yourself LDAP and perhaps Kerberos). Red Hat’s acquisition of Netscape’s Directory Server and Certificate System was just the start of our identity and access management strategy.

The freeIPA project and Red Hat Enterprise IPA are our next steps. freeIPA was started 10 months ago as an open source, standards-based identity and access management solution for the Unix/Linux environment. As of now, freeIPA is at version 1. Red Hat Enterprise IPA 1.0 will be based on this version and will make it simpler for admins to setup, deploy and manage an LDAP and Kerberos environment and that means users get the benefits of Kerberos-based single-sign-on. IPA will help with compliance by enabling one traceable identity for users, easier audit of user activity, migration from NIS and synchronization with Active Directory. This is all meant to manage a heterogeneous Linux and Unix environment.

While version 1.0 is focused on user identity management for the Unix/Linux world, we anticipate that version 2.0 will add the management of service and machine identity, policy and basic audit. freeIPA is looking to provide and manage secure identity for machines, virtual machines and services, easily manage who accesses what services on what machines, provide for central management of policy such as centrally managed sudoers and SELinux policy and centrally audit admin action. It is being built with a plug-in architecture to make it easier for the community to add in additional solutions. We are always looking for people to join the project and contribute.

You can learn more at www.freeIPA.org.

We hope you’re as excited about freeIPA and Red Hat Enterprise IPA as we are. Look forward to hearing more from the security team over the upcoming months.