featured card project

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).

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.

SPECIAL TO RSA-San Francisco-April 20, 2009-The Information Card Foundation (ICF) announced today the first seven Information Card projects to be featured on the new ICF website. The new site will be unveiled at a presentation at the RSA Security conference at the Moscone Center in San Francisco today. The announcement will be part of the Harnessing the Power of Digital Identity workshop the ICF is co-sponsoring with the Liberty Alliance on Monday, April 20. The presentation will be held at 2:15 p.m. at Esplanades 301&303 ("Purple 301&303"), Moscone Center.

The seven projects are actual examples of how the Information Card ecosystem simplifies and standardizes identity-based transactions regardless of the site, domain, application, or information involved.

"Just as people needed to first see a Web browser to understand what it could do, now they need to see an Information Card selector to understand its potential," said Drummond Reed, Interim Executive Director of the ICF. "Information cards have moved beyond theory to solve real-world challenges."

Information Cards bring a familiar offline paradigm-the cards you carry in your wallet-to the online world. They work with a new software tool called a selector that operates as an extension to your Web browser. Selectors are available today from ICF members Azigo, Microsoft, and Novell, as well as from several open source projects.

The seven projects to be featured include: