... BioPassword Inc. says it can prove it. The Issaquah, Wash.-based security software vendor has released what it claims is a one-of-a-kind, multilevel authentication tool that validates who you are based on how you type. CEO Mark Upson says the techniques used by the company's BioPassword Internet Edition software trace their roots back to the Morse code days, when telegraph operators were able to detect which of their colleagues was transmitting a message by how the dots and dashes were, er, dashed off by the sender. "There's a unique rhythm to a person's typing," Upson says. BioPassword can detect those rhythms in as few as eight characters, says Greg Wood, the company's chief technology officer. That makes BioPassword's technology ideal as a nonintrusive, second-level authentication process when key fobs, smart cards and biometric hardware are cumbersome for users.

Wood says the software captures "flight and dwell time," the unique microsecond sequences you make in between typing characters as well as the up, down and hold timing on each key. The software can identify individuals even when they're using different QWERTY keyboards than they usually do, he adds. BioPassword Internet Edition is aimed primarily at financial services firms and online retailers that need to authenticate their customers. Pricing starts at a one-time installation fee of US$30,000, plus $1 per user each year. An Enterprise Edition release for use within companies is due in July with hooks into Microsoft Corp.'s Active Directory, with LDAP support scheduled to follow soon thereafter.

Keeping end users away from ... forbidden corporate data is just as important as leading them to the right material. That's the message from two search-engine CEOs who both took shots at Google Inc.'s enterprise search appliance, which needs augmenting from external security products. "You must integrate security into your search infrastructure," says Francois Bourdoncle, who runs Paris-based Exalead SA. "A search engine can reveal information to the wrong people." Exalead is making its entry into the U.S. market this year. Its One:Search software integrates with Active Directory so end users get responses only to queries they have rights to see, according to Bourdoncle.

Laurent Simoneau, CEO of Coveo Solutions Inc. in Quebec City, agrees that security is critical, which is why his company's Enterprise Search 4.0 software includes permission and access rights down to the document level. Available this week, Version 4.0 indexes Notes and NetWare files for query and retrieval. It also can manage up to 100 million documents, compared with 10 million in Version 3.0. Later this year, Coveo plans to embed the search software in an appliance.

Tape continues to be a cost-effective ... data-backup technology. That claim comes -- no surprise -- from a tape drive vendor. Kelly Beavers, vice president of product marketing at Exabyte Corp., says that the Boulder, Colo.-based company's new VXA-172 drive will cost 17 cents per gigabyte on average, compared with an average cost of 27 cents per gigabyte for digital audio tape. The VXA-172 lists for $699 and can store 172GB on each tape. The product also can be configured in a $1,699 autoloader that can store a total of 1.7TB of data for unattended backup.