WINMAGIC JOINS THE HIGHLY-PRESTIGIOUS SMART CARD ALLIANCE
WinMagic’s SecureDoc Is The Only Full-Disk Encryption
Solution To Support Smart Card Alliance Vendors’ Card and Token Solutions
Mississauga, Ontario, April 19, 2005 - WinMagic Inc., the innovative leader in full-disk
encryption solutions, is very pleased to announce that it has joined the
prestigious Smart Card Alliance (www.smartcardalliance.org).
The Smart Card Alliance is comprised of the majority of the world’s smart card
and token manufacturers.
“As it has been six years since WinMagic first managed to successfully
overcome the extremely-complex task of integrating its SecureDoc full-disk
encryption solution at pre-boot with smart card technologies, becoming a member
of the Smart Card Alliance has been long overdue” said Thi Nguyen-Huu, CEO,
WinMagic. “The main reason for joining at this time is that WinMagic sees
world markets adopting more and more hardware tokens; smart cards and USB
cryptographic tokens, and routinely sees security-conscious organizations taking
data at rest protection on client machines more and more seriously now – with
user authentication playing an essential part in that process,” Nguyen-Huu
continued. “WinMagic’s SecureDoc enables its customers to combine
multi-factor user authentication at pre-boot time (before the operating system
starts) with granular, transparent full-disk encryption to provide the ideal
multi-layered security solution for notebooks, desktops, and PDA devices.”
The Smart Card Alliance is a not-for profit, multi-industry association working
to accelerate the widespread acceptance of multiple application smart card
technology. Its membership includes leading companies in the banking, financial
services, computer, telecommunications, technology, healthcare, retail, and
entertainment industries, as well as a number of government agencies. The
convergence of these major industry players is unprecedented and represents a
shared vision and commitment to providing an interoperable platform for the
delivery of a new generation of products and services based on smart card
technology.
The Alliance was created when the industry’s key organizations, the Smart Card
Industry Association and the Smart Card Forum, joined forces in early 2001. The
newly-combined membership brings together leading users and technologists from
both the public and private sectors. Membership is open to anyone focusing
resources and energy on the utilization of smart card technology.
“The Smart Card Alliance welcomes WinMagic and its SecureDoc full-disk
encryption solution,” said Randy Vanderhoof, Executive Director, Smart Card
Alliance. “New technologies joining the industry always provide for added
growth within the market, and with the market demanding better encryption
security tools and applications to protect sensitive data, WinMagic’s SecureDoc
certainly brings increased value to the smart card market.”
Since full-disk encryption solutions encrypt the entire hard drive on PCs,
including the Windows boot and system files, the Windows drivers are not
available to talk with the smartcard, which meant that it was previously
impossible to combine full-disk encryption and smart card technologies. WinMagic
has partnered with many token and reader vendors to eliminate this
extremely-complicated problem by ensuring SecureDoc can communicate directly
with these devices in its native low-level protocol. Due to the complex
integration issues facing encryption providers, WinMagic is confident that no
other vendors will be able to develop similar technology in the foreseeable
future – making WinMagic an obvious candidate for Smart Card Alliance
membership, and SecureDoc the obvious choice for organizations looking to
integrate encryption and multi-factor authentication.
“SecureDoc uses Public Key Cryptographic Standards PKCS#11 from the ground
up, even between its internal components. As an additional benefit, the standard
PKCS#11 enables SecureDoc to readily integrate with smartcards and USB tokens in
Windows,” explained Nguyen-Huu. “As a result, WinMagic now boasts the
widest integration with smart card and PKI vendors of any encryption provider,
and its proven SecureDoc solution is integrated with smart card deployments all
over the world – the government of New Zealand has deployed SecureDoc
successfully with smart card and PKI since 2001,” Nguyen-Huu continued. “Looking
forward, with the Homeland Security Presidential Directive 12 stating that by
October 26 all U.S. Federal Government employees and contractors (including
contractor employees) must utilize smart card technology to gain physical access
to Federally-controlled facilities and logical access to Federally-controlled
information systems, WinMagic can only see the growth of smart card adoption
continuing to rise.”Built on the
PKCS#11 standards, and featuring the AES 256-bit encryption algorithm,
SecureDoc’s encryption design has already achieved validations for Common
Criteria and FIPS 140-1 Level 2, among others, while its FORTEZZA-based version
is also the only disk encryption software certified by the NSA to safeguard U.S.
government secret information. SecureDoc is also CAPS validated by the CESG in
the United Kingdom, thus enabling SecureDoc implementations within Her Majesty’s
Government’s departments and ministries. For enterprise-wide deployment of the
SecureDoc client software, WinMagic offers its SecureDoc Enterprise Server.
Enterprise Server can implement SecureDoc on an unlimited number of PC’s, all
centrally managed from one workstation.
About WinMagic Inc.
WinMagic Inc., is a Canadian company based in Mississauga, Ontario. Its
SecureDoc line of products ensures protection of sensitive information stored on
desktops, laptops and PDA’s by employing authentication through passwords to
hardware tokens, biometrics, and PKI commencing right at pre-boot time.
WinMagic’s award winning products fulfill the requirements of even the most
security conscious users by focusing on concrete security features, nevertheless
still offering unparalleled flexibility. For more information concerning
WinMagic’s products or services, please visit call 1-888-879-5879 (toll free in
North America), +1 905 502-7000 (worldwide) or email
info@winmagic.com.
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