3G HOME ssAdvertising and Sponsorship ssFREE Daily 3G Newsletter

3rd July 2003

Japan : F5 Networks announced that the F5 BIG-IP(R) product will provide Secure Socket Layer (SSL) client authentication and SSL acceleration for data encryption and decryption for the world's leading mobile communications company, NTT DoCoMo Corporation's Freedom of Multimedia Access (FOMA) 3G phones.

NTT DoCoMo's new client authentication service, FirstPass service for FOMA phones, ensures high security for remote access to the enterprise intranet, individual authentication for online shopping, trading via mobile phone, and general mobile Internet access.

This new NTT DoCoMo service employs F5's BIG-IP 5000 series as the dedicated application traffic management device to provide high-speed data encryption and decryption for SSL transactions. Due to the large amount of processing power required for SSL encryption and decryption, server performance can be severely affected. Using F5's SSL Accelerator this process is removed from servers reducing server overheads and reducing costs. BIG-IP can be configured to check client certificate validity; when BIG-IP identifies the validity of a client certificate, it directs the client to the valid content servers or provides clients who have an invalid certificate to learn how to obtain a valid one.

"We have spent a considerable amount of time validating our SSL client authentication service with NTT DoCoMo's FirstPass service to ensure the best possible solution, and are happy that Japan's largest and leading provider of mobile technology chose F5 to ensure their solution is robust and safe," said Tim Goodwin, vice president of F5 Japan operations. "This validates our Application Traffic Management story, whereby our products are the connection between the network and the application, in this case FirstPass."

F5's BIG-IP is widely used in Japan as the leading provider of Application Traffic Management and SSL acceleration from mobile to Enterprise intranet and Internet systems. SSL is the most commonly used encryption standard for the Internet, File Transfer Protocol (FTP) and others, encrypting the data to protect personal information, including the secure transmission of credit card numbers.

FirstPass, FOMA and NTT DoCoMo are trademarks or registered trademarks of NTT DoCoMo, Inc. in Japan and other countries. FOMA service is only available to subscribers in Japan.