security

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).