government

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).

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).

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.

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.

-Government Embraces Innovative Technology to Support Citizen Participation-

(For more details about this release, please see our Open Identity for Open Government FAQ)

Washington, D.C. - September 9, 2009 - Ten industry leaders - Yahoo!, PayPal, Google, Equifax, AOL, VeriSign, Acxiom, Citi, Privo and Wave Systems - announced today they will support the first pilot programs designed for the American public to engage in open government - government that is transparent, participatory, and collaborative. This open identity initiative is a key step in President Obama's memorandum to make it easy for individuals to register and participate in government websites - without having to create new usernames and passwords. Additionally, members of the public will be able to fully control how much or how little personal information they share with the government at all times.

These companies will act as digital identity providers using OpenID and Information Card technologies. The pilot programs are being conducted by the Center for Information Technology (CIT), National Institutes of Health (NIH), U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and related agencies. The participating companies are being certified under non-discriminatory open trust frameworks developed under collaboration between the OpenID Foundation (OIDF) and the Information Card Foundation (ICF) per the federal government Trust Framework Provider Adoption Process.

Washington D.C. - At the Open Government Identity Management Solutions Privacy Workshop held today in Washington D.C., Don Thibeau, Executive Director of the OpenID Foundation, and Drummond Reed, Executive Director of the Information Card Foundation, announced a joint white paper from both foundations. Entitled Open Trust Frameworks for Open Government, the paper explains the approach both foundations are taking to enable open, Internet-scale trust networks using OpenID and Information Cards.

"Open trust frameworks are the way to bridge open identity technologies like OpenID and Information Cards with the trust requirements of large communities such as the U.S. federal government," said Mr. Reed. "They are a practical solution to enabling government agency websites and applications to accept identities from non-governmental identity providers. This reduces friction and lowers costs while at the same time increasing security and privacy."

The focus of the workshop was the privacy implications of introducing open identity technologies to federal websites. Besides Mr. Reed, speakers on this topic included: