Evidian launches a €10 million European research program for multi-domain policy management

London, Gartner IAM Summit, June 23rd 2008  – Evidian, the European leader in identity and access management, announces today the final approval for launching the MULTIPOL project, an ambitious ITEA-2 European research program led by Evidian. The MULTIPOL project, initiated and promoted by Evidian, aims at federating policy management across multiple domains. As the project leader, Evidian will coordinate the efforts of 10 major European technology companies and universities over two years to achieve project targets.

Evidian believes that policy management is today one of the major challenges in a global ecosystem. Indeed, many organizations extend their business outside traditional boundaries. To perform their jobs, employees must work from everywhere, and get access to applications run by other business units, affiliates, partners and suppliers.

Several technologies have already solved multi-domain authentication; the remaining challenge occurs once a user is authenticated. How to determine which resources he or she can use after entering the destination domain? The answer is multi-domain authorization, which is the focus of MULTIPOL.

MULTIPOL will deliver software modules which efficiently control access across domains that have different security policies. These modules will provide a cross-domain authorization chain, collaborating to determine trust-based access rights whenever needed. MULTIPOL will fully leverage existing work from Liberty Alliance and other federated identity specifications.

MULTIPOL will start in July 2008 and deliver its results by mid-2010. Over this duration, this Evidian-led project will devote over €10 million to research on multi-domain policy management. “As a major identity and access management player, Evidian invests heavily in R&D to deliver value to its customers” says Hassan Maad, Evidian Chief Operating Officer. “The MULTIPOL project is an example of how we integrate advanced research into groundbreaking commercial products.”

About ITEA-2

ITEA 2, the follow-up to the successful ITEA program, is a strategic pan-European program for advanced pre-competitive R&D in software for Software-intensive Systems and Services (SiS). ITEA 2 stimulates and supports projects that will give European industry a leading edge in the area of SiS, mobilizing a total of 20,000 person-years over eight years. See www.itea-office.org.