After many months of quietly donating engineering resources and code to an ambitious open source project, Novell has launched Bandit, an identity management solution that aims to allow companies integrate different identity systems and provide a consistent approach to securing and managing identity. The project has a somewhat surprising name, given the focus on security, privacy,and such.

Novell has lined up support for Bandit from a number of key industry players, including ActivIdentity, Eclipse, IBM, Liberty Alliance, Novacoast, Red Hat, Sun, Sxip Identity, Symantec and Trusted Network Technologies.

The project has been initiated with the objective of enabling application access to identity stores, supporting multiple and pluggable authentication methods and user-managed authentication credentials, providing a simple API for role-based access control, and simplifying auditing and reporting for compliance based on open standards and specifications. To meet these objectives, Bandit has identified a number of components:

• Common Authentication Services Adapter (CASA): for the storage of credentials and other authentication data by users and applications
• Common Identity: a framework for abstracting different identity data stores based on the Java Naming and Directory Interface (JNDI), which provides identity data mapping and transformation, caching, a policy engine and a variety of connectors for different identity data stores, including LDAP, SQL, and XML
• Compliance Records Architecture: provides an API for auditing based on name/value pairs and a taxonomy for the hierarchical classification of audit records
• Role Engine Architecture: for role-based access control and management of roles, relationships, membership, and dynamic separation of duties.

Novell has a track record in identity management products and some credibility in the open source world, due to its acquisition of Suse Linux, and is hoping that a freely available integration layer will mean more sales for the whole identity management market. Bandit is an ambitious project, since it sets out to address some of the more challenging, higher-level aspects of identity management such as role-based access control and compliance. Bandit currently has a number of sub-projects, including CASA, Common Identity, Compliance Record Framework, FLAIM, XFLAIM, and Role Engine. Each has its own roadmap and goals

“Novell’s initial sponsorship of the Bandit project is a natural extension of our leadership in both identity and open source, and we are gratified to see the groundswell of community support,” said Jeff Jaffe, executive vice president and chief technology officer for Novell, in a statement.

The Bandit services will work with existing industry standards such as the WS-* standards, Liberty Federation and Eclipse Higgins. Novell has acknowledged that Bandit has some overlap with the open-source Higgins effort, which aims at giving people more control over their personal online identity information. Bandit's developers are planning a Higgins context provider based on Bandit's Common Identity service. The context provider is the way the Higgins framework accesses different identity repositories.

Ultimately, Bandit aims to provide an easier approach to problems such as secure, role-based access and regulatory compliance reporting, Novell said.