Kantara Trust Registry – A Preview!

Kantara Initiative is pleased to officially launch a technology preview of our Identity Assurance Approved Credential Service Provider (CSP) Kantara Trust Registry (KTR).

Kantara operates the service and invites all communities to learn more about its application, share feedback, collaborate, and redistribute this registry (enabling inter-federation).  For more information please contact us.

What does the KTR do?
The Kantara Trust Registry provides a public online registry of Kantara Initiative Approved Services that is both human and machine-readable. The service provides humans, end-users and relying parties, the tools to understand that CSPs have been assessed against specific Service Assessment Criteria enabling humans to trust that service. The service also provides machines with a source that is authoritative by listing of signed metadata that verifies the certification status of CSP services.
What is the value of the KTR?
The key value that this technology preview service provides is actual technical Trust in the listing by providing a signed list of CSPs (or IdPs). The service provides real technical Trust that is accessible by machine or human in real time. This service has real world meaningful use. The metadata format is also already referenced in the FICAM SAML Web SSO technical profile as well as the SAML2INT (interoperability) profile that is adopted and evolving in the Kantara Federation Interoperability Work Group.
How is the KTR built?
The service has been built using developing open standards and includes a trusted source of SAML 2 metadata that complies with the SAML interoperable metadata profile (http://docs.oasis-open.org/security/saml/Post2.0/sstc-metadata-iop.pdf). Future updates in a beta release will include a registry of the Kantara Identity Assurance Framework Levels of Assurance within the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA).  Future iterations would leverage open source works like MDX and PEER.
Is the KTR robust?
Part of a robust offering is to ensure that the metadata service is mirrored.  We’re working with Kantara Board of Trustee members like the Internet Society to ensure that mirrors are stood up as we push the implementation out of preview to full launch (Q1 2013).
Who can use the KTR?
You can! Just understand the terms of use and redistribute! If you don’t know what to do please contact us.  We’d love to hear from you.
As a US Federal Identity Credential Access Management (FICAM) Trust Framework Provider (TFP) Kantara Service Approved Credential Service Providers (CSPs), assessed by Kantara Accredited Assessors, are eligible for procurement where Kantara Service Approved CSP credentials may be accepted by US Federal Government on-line services.  The KTR lists the metadata of those Approved CSPs… and we’re adding more as the program gains adoption!

We’d like to thank all of our members and communities at large for their support to create this preview and to further improve the implementation!

We welcome your organization to use and redistribute the metadata in this technology preview!  We expect more complete implementation of the service to come with the help of your comments, feedback and collaborations!