KMIP – New Encryption Protocol

February 13, 2009 – 2:33 PM

A number of industry heavywights have unveiled the Key Management Interoperability Protocol (KMIP), a new specification jointly developed by Brocade, EMC, HP, IBM, LSI, Seagate and Thales.

“Our customers’ IT environments are growing in complexity and, at the same time, these companies are under extreme pressures to meet compliance regulations and limit costs,” Mark Schiller, director of HP’s security office told IT Examiner. “KMIP was developed in an effort to simplify the process of encryption key management enterprise-wide and is the broadest and most comprehensive key management standards framework developed to date.”

According to Schiller, the standard targets multiple layers, including storage, applications, databases and files.

“The initial authors of the KMIP framework, HP, IBM, RSA/EMC & Thales/Ncipher, shared a common vision of making encryption across the enterprise easier and more transparent for our customers,” explained Schiller. “These four companies engaged more than 25 senior security engineers and architects in the joint activity. This effort was kicked off in late 2007 by the (original) four, with Brocade, LSI, Seagate, and more recently, NetApp, also joining the effort.”

Source:
http://www.itexaminer.com/industry-heavyweights-create-new-encryption-protocol.aspx