Identity management is a strong requirement in business today and federated identity management, which enables identities to be exchanged beyond the corporate boundary, is the logical next step.

RSA Security Inc. is responding with the release of the RSA Federated Identity Manager (RIM), a standalone software product that relies on the company's franchise in strong authentication to exchange trusted identities with customers and partners.

The product interoperates with leading identity and access management products so that customers can leverage their existing infrastructure investments. FIM integrates with RSA SecurID for two-factor authentication, and it works with RSA's ClearTrust identity management product.

FIM supports the identity federation standards SAML 1.0 and 1.1, and it will support the Liberty Alliance's ID-FF 1.2 specification and the WS-Federation standards in coming releases. RSA demonstrated Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) 1.1 interoperability at the RSA Conference 2004 in an Interoperability Lab co-sponsored by the federal General Services Administration.

SAML, being developed by the OASIS XML-Based Security Service Technical Committee, is an XML-based framework for exchanging security information.

Security information is expressed in the form of assertions about subjects that have an identity in a security domain. SAML defines a protocol by which clients can request assertions from SAML authorities and get a response. This protocol, consisting of XML-based request and response message formats can be bound to many underlying communications and transport protocols. SAML currently defines one binding, to SOAP over HTTP.

The RSA Federated Identity Manager, designed to meet the requirements of enterprises that intend to use identity federation, includes configuration tools to speed deployment, and an architecture that is scalable to a high number of users.

"We offer a standalone federation product that allows us to deploy more quickly and fit into the customer's existing identity infrastructure," says Howard Ting, senior product manager with RSA. "We are also marrying our strong authentication base with federation; customers want that level of trust. And we will support multiple standards that deal with federation. That's not ideal but the reality is that a company that invests in this wants to federate with all partners no matter what technology they have adopted."

Pricing for FIM is based on the number of connections a company needs, or the number of partners needed to exchange identities. For the entry price of $25,000, a company can receive identities from a single business partner. For $75,000, a company gets a FIM license to exchange identities with 10 partners.