Survey Sez 06/29/12

The global optical-components market posted revenues of $1.6 billion for a sequential gain of 5 percent in the first quarter of 2012, according to Ovum. Among the top 10 suppliers, Opnext’s 28-percent gain led the market. North America was a bright spot, with vendors citing strong spending from Verizon and cable operators. Ovum sees the market expanding by about another 4 percent sequentially in 2Q12, and it forecasts full-year revenues of $6.9 billion for 2012, translating into 6-percent annual growth…Researchers at Certified Security Solutions Inc. say they have uncovered a potentially serious security issue pertaining to the use of the Simple Certificate Enrollment Protocol (SCEP) in conjunction with mobile devices. Organizations that leverage SCEP to issue digital certificates to mobile devices may be subject to a privilege escalation attack. Apparently, the problem doesn’t stem from an implementation error in a single product or by an issue with the SCEP protocol itself, but rather by a combination of features, configurations and use cases that, together, open up a previously unforeseen avenue of attack. Mobile Device Management (MDM) systems that leverage SCEP to issue certificates for authentication into enterprise systems such as Wi-Fi, VPN or ActiveSync are among the most critically affected scenarios. As such, the company has been working with US-CERT and CERT/CC at Carnegie Mellon to facilitate notifications and information disclosure through the proper channels. To read its report, click here