Reactivity has signed a contract with Aeroplan to secure and simplify XML Web services integration with the program's growing roster of specialty reward partners. Part of the recently announced 2004 program upgrade to enable members to redeem miles for a much broader variety of goods and services, Aeroplan chose the Reactivity XML Firewall as the key security and integration technology for linking to partner systems.

Aeroplan, Canada's leading loyalty program and a wholly owned subsidiary of Air Canada, has more than six million members and a growing network of more than 100 accumulation partnerships with airline, hotel, car rental, financial, telecommunication, retail, services and entertainment partners. Members worldwide claim a new reward every 20 seconds. To facilitate its program expansion and ensure interoperability, Aeroplan specified XML SOAP-based Web services as the integrating technology for linking to their reward partners' systems. But Aeroplan still needed to secure the SOAP transactions, ensure member privacy and bridge technically dissimilar environments. The Reactivity XML Firewall enabled Aeroplan to address all these issues quickly and easily, with the initial proof of concept system successfully handling transactions just 90 minutes after the appliance was physically installed at the IBM Global Services data center.

"The Reactivity XML Firewall not only secured our Web services traffic, it offered an elegant solution for bridging our internal data format and transport protocol with the Web services standards used to communicate with our rewards partners," said Remi Lafrance, director IT e-business and architecture at Aeroplan. "We were particularly pleased with how quickly we were able to establish connections, important criteria for meeting our planned February rollout deadline."

The XML Firewall cuts through the clutter of Web services standards, supporting all the existing and evolving standards organizations actually need or are planning to use in the near future, including SOAP 1.1/1.2, SOAP with attachments, SAML, WSDL, WSI compliance, WS Security and others. Aeroplan was using a custom XML implementation in an IBM environment with IBM MQSeries messaging software as the base transport layer. The Reactivity XML Firewall's flexibility enabled Aeroplan to easily expose their systems to its partners as SOAP over HTTPS with the XML Firewall handling all the data format and communications protocol conversions.

"The Reactivity XML Firewall offers Aeroplan a flexible XML security solution that can easily scale as their specialty rewards program grows and adds new partners in the future," said Michael Hall, vice president of sales at Reactivity. "We are pleased that Aeroplan, one of the most innovative loyalty programs in the industry, has chosen the most innovative and reliable XML Web services security product available today."

Reactivity's XML Firewall handles the Aeroplan system's SSL termination, authentication and authorization of rewards partners, including X.509 digital certificate inspection, and controls access to the information contained in the member records to ensure no inappropriate data is exposed. It performs data validation on all requests from external systems to prevent unintended or malicious activity, such as SQL injection and entity expansion attacks, and employs nCipher hardware acceleration and hardware key storage.

The Reactivity XML Firewall sits at the edge of the corporate network to secure message flow between distributed applications. It is an XML proxy that performs threat defense, authentication, authorization, auditing, XML validation and routing to secure bi-directional message flow. By decoupling security from application development, the Reactivity XML Firewall eliminates the time-consuming and costly process of custom security programming, infrastructure integration and security policy maintenance for each XML web service application.

Reactivity provides a security solution for XML-based Web services.