You probably could’ve guessed that this blog has been retired since VeriSign acquired TrustBearer in April of this year. We’ve also retired the trustbearer.com domain, but we still get a fair amount of traffic here, so I’m moving this blog back to it’s original WordPress URL, openidtrustbearer.wordpress.com.
Yes, this will break some inbound links, but at least the content will still be searchable. Thanks to everyone who has read and contributed over the years.
Posted in trustbearer
My name is Rachel Steger, Office Manager for TrustBearer. As a newcomer to the world of start-ups and software development last summer, my first six months with TrustBearer have been hugely enlightening. With a background only in medium to large-sized corporations, I have found that I had a few misconceptions about what my professional life would look like once employed by an early-stage start-up company. I never realized how non-existent bureaucracy could be within a hugely successful company, or how much of a relief it would be to not have to wear a suit and heels for my first day in the office.
TrustBearer life is about as casual as it gets – which is pretty typical for a small software company, from what I understand. We all appreciate the flexibility of tracking our own hours and coming to work in shorts in the summer, if we want to. Work hours are often long, but we all have a good time while we’re here.
The casual environment should not be confused for a slow-paced work day, however, or a lack of professionalism. Work pours in and we pour it back out. Projects show up with short deadlines, customers on other continents need immediate attention and assistance, and our office in D.C. keeps us hopping with an ever-growing list of government sales.
As Office Manager, I’ve been tasked with adding structure to this small company as it quickly outgrows its start-up status – as well as just about anything else that needs done (OK, so we’re not quite out of the start-up phase yet). I would have to say that one of the joys of my job is that there are very few of us who have to come to consensus on how this should be done, which simplifies the process immensely. The challenge has been to figure out how to grow without killing the great environment that has been built here over the past five years — how to add policies and procedures without completely annihilating the freedoms that we all appreciate on a daily basis.
When I joined the company last year, I didn’t quite anticipate the types of clients that a company of a dozen people would be working with on a daily basis – large enterprise customers and government clients such as SSA, FAA, Air Force, and others, to name a few. As the smallest company in the smart card/middleware market, it has been exciting to see us build important relationships with large-scale companies, and to understand that even a small company in Fort Wayne, Indiana can make a world-wide impact in the security industry.
2009 was a great year for TrustBearer! For the first time we have formal, dedicated 24-7 customer support; we helped rollout a healthcare product and obtained an exclusive American Hospital Association (AHA) endorsement; we expanded to a second location in downtown Washington, D.C.; we made an appearance on the GSA schedule; and we forged exciting partnerships with companies from all over the world. It will be interesting to see what 2010 looks like.
Stay tuned…..
If you are going to be at the RSA Conference this year, we look forward to talking with you.
The RSA Security Expo
Monday March 1st – Thursday March 4th
VeriSign Booth #1717
(see map below)
San Francisco, CA
Moscone Center
This year, we’ve worked with VeriSign to integrate TrustBearer’s technology with VeriSign’s Managed PKI (MPKI) product, and we’ll be showing demos of this joint solution at the VeriSign booth.
We’ll also be showing our updated OpenID and SAML identity provider, which now allows users to register their computer with VeriSign MPKI. Similarly, users with PIV and CAC smart cards, and many other security devices, can use their credential for multi-factor authentication to web applications like Google Apps, Salesforce, and Basecamp.
If you would like to schedule a meeting with us during the conference, send us an email: sales@trustbearer.com.
To learn what we are up to during the conference, follow us on Twitter: @trustbearer.
Posted in demo, enterpise openid
Tagged Managed PKI, openid, RSA, saml, secruity conference
We’ll be at HIMSS 2010 next week with EXTENSION Inc., showing the EXTENSION HealthID product:
HIMSS 2010
Monday March 1st – Thursday March 4th
Booth #5955
Atlanta, Georgia World Congress Centre
Show Hours Are:
If you are at HIMSS this year, we’ll look forward to talking with you.
In my line of work at TrustBearer, we work with a number of different identifiers, be they OpenID URIs, usernames, or email addresses. In this way, I probably don’t have an realistic appreciation for how most people using such identifiers think and feel about their email addresses, usernames, or twitter handles. And for this reason, I’ve found the research of doctoral student Ben Gross (@bengross) quite interesting and valuable.
In short, Gross has found that people have rather personal feelings about the identifiers that they are assigned and used, and they have a hard time using these identifiers how they would like, or how their employer expects them to.
Much of this research was discussed in a recent presentation at BayChi San Francisco (a chapter of the ACM Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction).
Gross’s research involved talking with people in two types of companies, financial and creative, about the identifiers they use at work and in their personal life. His findings help explain why people often accidentally (and purposely) misuse identity systems:
Gross also has looked into what people know and don’t know about their privacy related to identifiers. Like something you are or something you have, the things that you are assigned, such as a IP address, a location, or a web cookie, act as identifiers. And it is these identifiers that are most often used on the web for tracking people’s behavior and information (See Kim Cameron’s recent post about browser fingerprints). In this case, Gross looks forward to better applications and tools that allow average web users to control their privacy and for more transparent policies with regard to what information companies or other entities store and track.
Gross’ dissertation and published writings are available on his website. He has written about OpenID and OAuth on his blog at The Messaging News.
Digital Trust 