Our Solutions
Creatrix® solutions have a real effect on our customers. We are the catalyst that helps them achieve their goals. The goal of a solution is to produce positive outcomes as related to finances, time, and/or user and customer satisfaction. Here are a few examples of our solutions:
Biometric Password Reset
Field personnel would routinely lock out their Active Directory accounts, which placed undue strain on the help desk and systems administration team. Creatrix developed an application to read the fingerprint templates from a PIV-type card and match them to the person using the computer. Retrieval of the template required that the user enter their card PIN. This essentially amounted to a three-factor authentication – "something they have, something they are, something they know." If the match was successful, the user was prompted for a new password. The template was then transmitted, along with the fingerprint and new password, to a back-end server. If the server verified the match, then it would change the user’s password to the new password. All traffic was encrypted over a VPN connection.
Benefit: Reduced help desk call volume by 40%.
PKI Certificate Renewal System
A certificate authority’s (CA) fulfillment process was manual, and there were more than 400 workstations that used certificates for VPN machine authentication. The manual process was as follows:
- Generate PCKS 10 request
- Fill out online web form
- Upload PCKS 10 request
- Print paperwork from website
- Sign paper work
- Mail paper work to CA
- Wait for CA email
- Download certificate from CA
- Install certificate on workstation
Creatrix wrote software to automate the process. A web service permitted workstations to request a new certificate; a message broker then called a custom library to generate a PCKS10 certificate request. The form was completed, and the required paperwork was generated as signed PDF documents which were then emailed to the CA. A custom service then checked the CA for new certificates on a daily basis. If new ones were found, the message broker would join the certificate with the private key, encrypt it, and store it in a database. On the workstation’s next web service request, the web service would retrieve the certificate from the database, encrypt it with the public key, and transmit the encrypted package to the work station that would then install the certificate.
Benefit: Eliminated manual process for nearly 400 computers.
JVM Tuning
A web application was experiencing serious performance problems, only handling 10 concurrent users before terminating due to an out-of-memory exception. Creatrix first profiled garbage collection and verified that the out-of-memory exceptions were occurring due to a condition were the heap fills up too quickly for the garbage collector to effectively free heap space. Applying knowledge of how web applications operate, Creatrix engineers reconfigured the JVM heap settings to increase the amount of space available for short-lived objects. This adjustment allowed the application to handle over 100 concurrent users.
Benefit: Increased user capacity by 10 times.
