Security added to SEWP

A key part of NASA's new Scientific and Engineering Workstation Procurement (SEWP III) is the SEWP Security Center.

The purpose of the Security Center, which is new with SEWP III and has been operational for less than a year, is to evaluate information technology security products and provide comparative analyses to SEWP customers.

"We see it as an IT security think tank," said Dave Heimann, SEWP information systems manager. Among the center's current interests are Kerberos interoperability and IPsec, or IP security protocols.

Kerberos, developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is an advanced security technology based on the use of cryptographic keys.

IPsec is an industry standard for security at the network or packet process layer of a virtual private network, so individual computers and applications do not need to be configured.