InformationWeek

What that means, says Ian Gordon, director of Entrust's business-to-consumer strategic market unit, is that TruePass doesn't rely on browser plug-ins or ActiveX controls, making it easy to use. And for companies trying to establish secure Internet connections with their business partners, that eliminates the hassle of having to ask those partners to install large programs on their systems. It also eliminates having to decide on standardized warning "dialog box" messages.

Users can log on to servers running TruePass from anywhere, with any machine, using existing passwords and user names, or "shared secrets" (information the company knows about the user, such as a maiden name or birth date) to access the system.

Gordon says TruePass, which uses a 70-Kbyte Java applet, enables public key infrastructure, encryption, certificates, and digital signatures to function below Internet, intranet, and extranet applications. The process is invisible to users.

Jim Hurley, an analyst with the Aberdeen Group, says one of the biggest complaints customers have with Internet security products is that the software is just too fat. "Entrust customers often had a hard time getting their business partners to agree to install the software on their machines. It was just too bulky. This should put an end to that."

Tom Hagan, CIO for PersonalPath Systems Inc., a provider of health-care services on the Web, says he's working with Entrust to create a safe way for users to access confidential health-care-related goods and services. Hagan says his company chose TruePass because it provides true mobility for customers--users can access data privately from any workstation--and because it requires no software installation and virtually no support costs. "These new Java capabilities, for the first time, make PKI security available to the masses," Hagan says.