United Security Providers Secure Entry Server

Short Summary

Delivering the right user access to the right application at the right time is increasingly critical as organizations collaborate more with partners, customers, freelancers, and mobile workers, and as applications shift toward browser-based delivery and cloud services. Identity and Access Management teams must quickly and reliably adapt integrations between application infrastructure, identity providers, and end users to meet business agility, security, and privacy demands. Web Access Management (WAM)—combining web application firewalls and access management—and Identity Federation are positioned as foundational technologies for consistently managing access across internal and external systems, including hybrid and cloud environments.

WAM functions as a gateway in front of applications, handling authentication and typically coarse-grained authorization, and can inject HTTP headers to pass authorization information to backend applications or expose APIs for authorization decisions. Identity Federation standardizes identity usage across organizations by splitting authentication and authorization between an Identity Provider and Service Provider/Relying Party, using interoperable protocols such as OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, and UMA, and supporting configurations like federation from internal directories to cloud providers.

United Security Providers (USP), a Swiss vendor with offices in Bern, Zurich, London, and Minsk, offers USP Secure Entry Server (SES), a modular suite combining WAF, access management, CIAM capabilities, and federation. SES targets medium and large enterprises with heterogeneous users and identity sources accessing diverse applications. Modules include SES WAF (reverse proxy, SSL termination, OWASP Top 10 protection), SES Access (cross-domain SSO, adaptive risk-based authentication, trust elevation), SES Federate (SAML, OAuth2/OIDC, IdP proxy), and SES Identity (API-enabled directory/IdP with self-service and provisioning). SES adds anomaly detection across logs, supports multiple deployment models (hardware, virtual, cloud, OpenShift containers, managed service), and emphasizes interoperability, configurability via USP Connect, and avoidance of low-value feature bloat, while facing limitations in global services reach and non-support of standards like WS-*.

Interesting Facts

• Web Access Management is described as the combination of Web Application Firewalls and Access Management.
• Web Access Management can intercept and modify browser–server communication using HTTP header injection to pass authorization information to backend applications.
• Identity Federation can split authentication and authorization between an Identity Provider and a Service Provider/Relying Party.
• OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, and UMA are listed as standardized protocols used for federation interoperability.
• United Security Providers is organized as a Swiss public limited company (AG) with offices in Bern, Zurich, London, and Minsk.
• United Security Providers employs more than 100 security professionals and operates a 24/7 Security Operations Center.
• USP Secure Entry Server is positioned as a combined Web Application Firewall, Access Management, CIAM, and Identity Federation solution.
• SES includes an anomaly detection engine that flags statistically relevant deviations from predefined expected patterns in log data.
• SES deployment options include hardware appliances, virtual appliances, cloud appliances, and OpenShift Docker containers.
• SES Federate supports SAML-based federation and social federation using OAuth2 and OpenID Connect, and can act as an IdP proxy.

Notable Quotes

• “Providing the right access to the right application for the right user at the right time is getting increasingly important for today’s organizations.”
• “Requirements and use cases change swiftly.”
• “Web Access Management acts as a gateway approach that is logically located in front of standard applications and performs authentication and usually coarse-grained authorization to back-end applications.”
• “Identity Federation describes the standardized use of the same identity data across multiple organizations.”
• “As a result, access management and federation have changed their initial roles of being tactical IT tools to strategic infrastructure elements that enable business agility while maintaining the necessary security and compliance.”
• “Other than many vendors and organizations do, there is no technological distinction between a specific consumer orientated offering (CIAM=Consumer IAM) and a traditional enterprise IAM.”
• “Lesser frequently used features, often bloating competing solutions are deliberately omitted.”
• “A unique approach of the USP solution is the option to provide customer organizations with self-service configuration features and the ability to scale the overall solution through the USP Connect platform.”
• “SES includes an anomaly detection engine that identifies unusual behavior, events or patterns in log files across the individual components.”
• “Multi-tenancy built into the overall architecture for tenant isolation”