awards

Munich, Germany -- Information Cards and ICF members were very active in the European Identity Conference (EIC) in Munich this past week. To begin with, ICF board member Kim Cameron accepted the European Identity Award for “Best Innovation” on behalf of Microsoft for its U-Prove minimal disclosure technology. The award was shared with IBM for its similar Idemix technology. Both solutions were lauded by EIC host Kuppinger Cole as pioneering efforts in enhancing online privacy and security.

Mr. Cameron also gave a keynote address, “Federated Directory meets Minimal Disclosure: Mortal Enemies or Soul Mates?” in which he showed how cloud computing, social networks, and enterprise collaboration demand federation of directory information across trust boundaries to create a distributed information fabric. Mr. Cameron then asserted that, by using technologies like U-Prove, these federations can be built to be consistent with the requirements of minimal disclosure.

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.

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.

Kuppinger Cole, organizers of the European Identity Conference 2009 (EIC) taking place from May 5-8 in Munich, Germany, announced today that they have conferred the European Identity Award for Best New or Improved Standard to the Information Card Foundation.

The award was granted for the ICF's contribution to standardizing Information Cards as a core technology for the future of identity management. It was accepted by ICF board members Paul Trevithick, Axel Nennker, Kim Cameron, and Mike Jones, all of whom are attending the EIC.

"On behalf of the Information Card Foundation, I want to thank Kuppinger Cole and the EIC for this honor", said Drummond Reed, ICF Executive Director. "The purpose of ICF is to bring an open community together to advance Information Card standards, implementations, and practices around the world, and this is a sign we are making real progress."

Kuppinger Cole also issued every registered user of the EIC conference a managed Information Card that can be used to enter the conference portal at www.kuppingercole.com. These cards were issued using the Webcard Loyalty portal service provided by ICF member fun communications.

The EIC also hosted in the inaugural meeting of the German Chapter of the ICF. Further reporting on that meeting will be posted once the EIC has concluded.