TCG plugfest showcases interoperability - and Diet Cokes!

TCG Interoperability Fun – Lots of Diet Coke, Some Late Nights and a Few Flashing Lights by TCG in Action Share Ah, the joys of plugfests! Where else can you combine a swimming pool's worth of Diet Coke, lots of flashing lights, some fun new network security stuff, and a bunch of folks frantically cabling stuff together? Try the most recent interoperability testing event, aka the PlugFest, organized by Trusted Computing Group's TNC work group and hosted by member Infoblox.

Over three days, tech teams from Boeing, Fachhochschule Hannover (FHH), Infoblox, Insightix, Juniper Networks, and Lumeta played with fourteen implementations of TNC specifications. This is the fifth year TCG has held the plugfest.

We tested implementations of a Metadata Access Point (MAP) and multiple TNC components acting as MAP clients. Sensors published event data via IF-MAP; a Policy Decision Point (PDP) published user session information and took action based on event metadata from the sensors; and a Flow Controller dynamically changed access control policies based on event metadata. Implementations ranged from commercially available products that you can deploy today, to open source projects, to alpha code that was being debugged and developed on the fly!

What does all of this mean? For one, interoperability testing is an important component of certification, which is a planned program for TNC. Second, it gives vendors a real-world forum for evaluating how their products behave on a network in an enterprise environment with other products supporting TNC specifications. This is where the rubber meets the road... After all, a key reason to develop and use industry standards is to offer users a choice of products with baseline functionality that work together no matter the vendor. Participating in the PlugFest helps member companies ensure that when you deploy their TNC-enabled product in your environment, it just works.

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