Drummond Reed's blog

Last December ICF Executive Director Drummond Reed spent a day in Victoria, B.C. with the identity management team in the Office of the CIO for the Province of British Columbia, including Ian Bailey, the Executive Director of Architecture and Standards, Charmaine Lowe, Director of Information Standards, and Patricia Wiebe, Senior Identity Architect. The following interview is based on many of the topics they discussed.

Q: Let’s start with the big picture: when did your office first begin to focus on identity management?

A: Back in 1996 we determined that identity management was going to be key to developing a shared services approach for the delivery of IM/IT services for government and started a program to develop a corporate identity management Technology was a real barrier for us at that point, but with the release of Windows Active Directory in 2000 we were able to consolidate most of our directories into a single centralized domain for government workers.  Also at that time we were building our first version of an authentication service to support government’s interactions with businesses and citizens, and in 2002 we started our BCeID identity provider service.  We learned a lot from those first efforts, particularly that directory centric solutions were not going to work in the long term.

Q: So you’ve been at this a long time. Overall, what are the goals of your IdM program, i.e., what’s your vision for what IdM can do for the BC government and the people of the province?

ICF will be an active participant in the OASIS IMI Interop to be held next week at the 2010 RSA Conference at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. The Interop will focus on demonstrations of the GSA ICAM IMI 1.0 Profile for use of Information Cards to U.S. government identity assurance levels.

Contributors to the ICF presence at the Interop include Avoco Secure, Azigo, the Province of British Columbia, Equifax, Meristic, Microsoft, Openinfocard, and PayPal. They will be demonstrating Information Cards, relying party sites, and selectors compatible with the GSA ICAM IMI 1.0 Profile.

The IMI Interop will be held in the OASIS booth (#2545) on the RSA show floor. The booth will be open:

• 6-8PM Monday March 1
• 11-6PM Tuesday March 2
• 11-6PM Wednesday March 3
• 11-3PM Thursday March 4

Currently IMI Interop presentations are scheduled every two hours during the day in the booth. Direct interop demonstrations will be going on continuously. We invite you to come by the booth and visit us.

ICF will also be participating in a major announcement about the establishment of new infrastructure for online identity assurance – watch for further information here.

Lastly, the ICF Board of Directors will hold a face-to-face meeting from 3-7PM on Thursday March 4 at SPUR, 654 Mission Street (two blocks from Moscone).

Avoco Secure today announced it will launch the first "universal identity broker", a new product call Open2Connect that will make it much easier and more seamless for users to access online resources such as websites, documents, etc. using any identification/authentication method, including username/password, Information Cards, OpenID®, X509 digital certificate, Windows Live® ID, SAML, etc.

The Open2Connect UIB system ensures that a user can utilise any preferred login method, as long as that method contains the information required by the site to allow access (called a "claim"). Examples of claims include names, email addresses, or account numbers. The UIB can also go a step further by controlling access to the web resource through associating levels of assurance with the login, for example specifying that the claim must originate from a specified source.

The whole login process is handled by the UIB: the user simply clicks on the login button as usual -- vital in retaining usability of websites. The UIB will then present the user with choices of login method from their preferred list -- showing only those that the website will accept (because they contain the correct claim). The communication between the login method, the identity provisioning site (as appropriate) and the website is all handled by the UIB.

ICF Steering Member Equifax Inc. announced this week that it has chosen Anakam, Inc. to provide the electronic authenticator for the Equifax I-Card. Anakam will implement its Anakam.TFA® Two Factor Authentication service, making the Equifax I-Card the first to have the maximum ease of use as well as the highest level of authentication security (Level 3) in the marketplace.

According to ICF board member Ron Carpinella, Equifax's Vice President of Identity Management, "This speaks to our efforts to provide strong authentication for the U.S. federal government via i-cards and the ICAM trust framework." The Information Card Foundation, together with the OpenID Foundation, has been instrumental in working with the U.S. GSA Identity, Credential, and Access Management (ICAM) Subcommittee to create a trust framework that enables U.S. citizens to use open identity credentials to access U.S. government websites.

The Anakam platform will be incorporated into the Equifax I-Card offering to provide on-going two-factor authentication without the need for distribution of smart cards and hard tokens to end users while still complying with the standards established around these devices. With Level 3 authentication, there is high confidence in the validity of the user's asserted identity as determined by U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB) guidelines and the technical recommendations of the National Institutes of Standards and Technologies (NIST).

On the ICF mailing list earlier this week, ICF member Markus Sabadello, a leader of several Information Card-related open source projects, announced the availability of CardGears, a hosted service for web sites wishing to issue Managed Information Cards.

As Mr. Sabadello points out, Managed Information Cards can be issued by any website, whether just to provide a simpler and more secure sign-in mechanism, or to expand their brand to becoming part of the user experience every time a card is used. This website issuing a managed card is authoritative for the data on it. Technically, this requires two components:

• A card issuing component. This produces and sends to the user a card file (in the .crd format) each time a new card is issued.
• A Security Token Service (STS). This is the component that provides the claim values (identity information) on a card, such as first name, last name, e-mail address, etc. The STS is invoked every time a user uses or previews their card.

Mr. Sabadello explains, “CardGears makes it as simple as possible to operate both of the above components. First, you can design, issue and modify cards by using the intuitive web interface, without any programming at all. Second, you can use various APIs to integrate the CardGears service with your own applications. And you can mix and match each of these two approaches as needed for your site.”

There are currently has four demo sites illustrating various aspects of Information Cards and CardGears:

Bethesda, MD, USA – The first iTrust Forum, held today at the National Institute of Health (NIH) headquarters in Bethesda, MD, featured a four-part session about the U.S. government’s Open Identity for Open Government Initiative. NIH is leading government adoption of this initiative through the NIH Federated Identity Service. NIH demonstrated the first production use of open identity technologies at the iTrust Forum by showing how the Federated Identity Service now accepts logins from several of the ten OpenID and Information Card identity providers who have announced participation in the initiative.

In a separate demonstration, Don Schmidt of Microsoft showed a prototype “multi-protocol selector” – software that will enable users to do both OpenID and Information Card registration/login to websites through one simple, safe, visual interface. This will make authentication at many different websites dramatically simpler for users while at the same time providing strong protection against the main source of phishing attacks.

ICF Executive Director Drummond Reed and OpenID Foundation Executive Director Don Thibeau presented the Open Identity Framework (OIF), a new open trust framework model being developed jointly by the ICF and OIDF to solve the problem of how third-party portable identity credentials such as OpenID and Information Cards can be trusted in very large deployments, such as across the entire U.S. population and all U.S. government websites.

Mountain View, CA – November 2, 2009 – Avoco Secure, a leading security, digital identity, and digital signature vendor based in the U.K., announced at the OpenID Summit today that it is releasing the first commercially available Information Card selector software that operates completely “in the cloud”. Called CloudCard, it is a standard Information Card selector implementation that requires no installation and works from any conventional browser on a desktop, laptop, or mobile device.

Susan Morrow, Product Manager for CloudCard, demonstrated today how it eliminates the need for local client software, which is one of the barriers to widespread adoption of the Information Card digital identity standard. CloudCard uses the standard IMI 1.0 Information Card format and protocol so it works immediately with any Information Card issuer. Websites that wish to accept Information Cards from CloudCard currently need to add some simple custom HTML code to their web page, but according to Ms. Morrow this step is easy compared to the hurdle of requiring users to install a desktop selector, and Avoco plans to standardize this special code so it can be used with any cloud selector.

Avoco will demonstrate CloudCard again tomorrow at the Internet Identity Workshop in Mountain View.

For more information, see the Avoco Secure press release or visit the CloudCard demonstration page on their website.

ICF Executive Director Drummond Reed just returned from a two-week trip to the EU. He shares the following observations:

My first stop was giving a keynote at the NordSec conference in Oslo, wonderfully organized by Dr. Audun Jøsang of the University of Oslo. The agenda was one of the richest of any conference in my recent memory; I found myself taking notes constantly on talks covering STORK, ID management based on mobile SIM cards, and privacy risks in Web 2.0, among other topics.

The day ended with a panel on “Global identity management – a threat or an opportunity for privacy?” I spoke strongly in favor of the opportunity Information Card technology offers for privacy protection, and how the U.S. government’s open identity solutions initiative is taking advantage of this. That initiative and the ICF/OIDF open trust frameworks project drew a great deal of interest among the largely EU-based audience—its potential for helping “raise the bar” on Internet privacy was one the main themes of the panel.

The ICF congratulates fun communications for winning a 2009 IDDY award in the Proof-Of-Concept category for their Webcard Loyalty program. Webcard Loyalty was one of the first seven Featured Card Projects that were announced by the ICF at RSA 2009 in April 2009.

At Digital ID World 2009, the Kantara Initiative awarded fun communiations one of six IDDY awards in recognition of its online service that uses Information Card technology to let anyone create their own customer loyalty system for the Internet using “virtual loyalty cards”. To quote the Kantara press release:

The application combines user-centric identity management and customer loyalty programs such as bonus points, coupon promotions and discounts on partner websites, into a single application. Retailers and portal operators can issue their own virtual loyalty cards that can serve as a reliable means of authentication and authorization. The portal can be adapted to meet individual requirements, and is suitable for issuing all types of virtual identification cards such as student ID cards, library cards and discount cards. More information is available by visiting http://www.fun.de and http://www.webcard-loyalty.com.

ICF Executive Director Drummond Reed and OpenID Foundation Executive Director Don Thibeau will present the foundation’s joint Open Trust Framework at the OASIS Identity Management 2009 conference tomorrow at the NIST headquarters in Gaithersburg, Maryland. The theme of the conference is Transparent Government: Risks, Rewards, and Repercussions.

The Open Trust Framework, summarized in the OIDF/ICF joint white paper Open Trust Frameworks for Open Government, is a mechanism that enables relying parties (the websites and services that accept open identity credentials such as OpenID or Information Cards from individuals) to verify that identity providers (the third parties providing such credentials on behalf of the individual) are certified to provide those credentials at the level of assurance (LOA) the relying party requires.

In the case of U.S. government, for example, there are four LOAs defined by NIST and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), each with its own level of identity proofing, security, and privacy requirements. With the Open Trust Framework, U.S. government websites will be able to determine if a particular identity credential meeting the ICAM OpenID 2.0 profile or IMI Information Card 1.0 profile at a particular LOA was issued by an identity provider certified to meet the U.S. government requirements at that LOA.