The panel was well received with many interested attendees who had insightful questions regarding the services coming on line, those that are already active and how compliance is verified to assure Trust. But perhaps one of the most interesting services we learned about was the recent announcement of a service from the US Social Security Administration (SSA) called “my Social Security” (read the SSA Press Release).

“my Social Security” service allows public citizens to create an account through SSA.gov which, upon verification, allows citizen access to earnings histories, social security statements and projected social security benefits upon retirement. What was even more exciting was that I was able to access the service and create a “my Social Security” account within approximately 5 minutes AND using an iPhone!

Here’s how it works
“To get a personalized online Statement, people age 18 and older must be able to provide information about themselves that matches information already on file with Social Security. In addition, Social Security uses Experian, an external authentication service provider, for additional verification. People must provide their identifying information and answer security questions in order to pass this verification. Social Security will not share a person’s Social Security number with Experian, but the identity check is an important part of this new, robust verification process.”

During the verification process I was asked to provide the last digits of a valid credit card. I decided to opt out of that mode and was provided with a number of alternate paths. I choose to verify using some values from my US Tax W-2 forms. The site also offers added security via one time pins sent to users via SMS. I encourage all US citizens/residents to try the service for your own experience.

While the press release indicates that the service is not perfect and some individuals may not be able to pass the Authentication questions, there are currently alternative means of verification via in-person proofing at a local SSA office. Trusted identity services linking citizens to government services still has a long way to go in terms of offerings and adoption, however this service is at the forefront of providing US citizens a view and access in to their benefits via US Gov services and an indicator of the exciting developments to come for trusted and verified Identity Ecosystems.

Relating to these activities I will note that, Experian is a member of the Kantara Initiative and currently has an application registered for Kantara Credential Service Provider Service Approval at Level of Assurance 3 non-crypto for a service they are offering which, once approved, would be listed in the US Federal Identity Credential Access Management (ICAM) Trust Framework which has adopted the Kantara Identity Accreditation and Approval Program based on the Identity Assurance Framework (IAF) as one of the US Gov Approved Trust Framework Providers. We at Kantara look forward to continuing development of the Trust Framework model with the US Government, Experian and all of our public and private sector members.

A presentation by Joni Brennan, Executive Director of Kantara Initiative - The Bridge to Communities Assurance, Governance and Technical Interoperability

Video Presentation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHFqMUe04lQ&feature=youtu.be

Slides: http://www.slideshare.net/kantarainitiative/kantara-a-global-context-2011

We invite you to join us at our 2-day event where Kantara’s Board of Trustees (BoT), Leadership Council (LC), Discussion Groups (DGs) and Working Groups (WGs) will convene.

Take advantage of the early bird registration which is available until September 23, 2011. With our pricing structure, you can sign up for 1 day or the full event. See the current agenda and specific event logistics in detail at our events wiki space.

We look forward to seeing you in the Bay Area.

Registration: http://kantararedwoodcitymtg.eventbrite.com

Piscataway, NJ – May 10, 2011 – Kantara Initiative sponsored the test event for the purpose of testing the interoperability of implementations in accordance with the SAML 2.0 specifications. The event was conducted by the Drummond Group Inc. (DGI) with oversight from the Kantara Interoperability Review Board (IRB). The Web-based full-matrix testing allows vendors to participate from anywhere in the world and features rigorous processes for ensuring products meet SAML 2.0 interoperability requirements for open, secure and privacy-respecting federated identity management. The testing itself was conducted from January 10 to March 1, 2011.

“SAML 2.0 has proven to be critical to how cross-domain security is enabled both between enterprises and between enterprises and cloud service providers,” said Matthew Gardiner, director at CA Technologies and president of Kantara Initiative. “Organizations can count on the Kantara Initiative testing process to certify products that have proven to meet rigorous interoperability requirements. This certification process should serve as a key business enabler as more and more sensitive applications cross Web domains.”

This is the first SAML full-matrix interoperability test event sponsored by the Kantara Initiative, continuing the program it inherited from the Liberty Alliance. Full-matrix testing is the best means to verify product group interoperability as it verifies that every product can successfully interact and interoperate with the other products in the test group using the test criteria. This test marked the second time the SAML 2.0 eGovernment (eGov) Profile, Version 1.5, was included in the event. The eGov profile was produced as a result of a multi-government effort to create a SAML conformance profile for government-centric identity management.

“CA Technologies is especially pleased to receive the Kantara Initiative’s SAML 2.0 certification for CA Federation Manager. CA Technologies supports the important role that the SAML standard has in providing enhanced security for organizations as they take advantage of the rapidly growing market for Cloud services and other identity-centric services on the Internet.” said Ellen Newlands, CA Technologies Product Manager and Kantara Interoperability Review Board Co-Chair.

“The SAML 2.0 interoperability certification is beneficial for vendors to test and validate standards based implementation of federation capabilities and help support customer’s heterogeneous IT environment and business needs,” said Ravi Srinivasan, Program Director, IBM Security Solutions.

“Support of identity federation and SAML 2.0 are critical to many SAP customers”, states Michael Friedrich, Vice President for Security and Identity Management at SAP AG, “and it is a crucial step to execute on SAP’s strategy to offer on demand applications and allow for secure access and Single Sign-On between on premise and on demand offerings in heterogeneous landscapes. With the SAML support in SAP NetWeaver Application Server ABAP 7.02 and with that also in the highest SAP Business Suite 7i2010 release as well as with the latest version of SAP NetWeaver Identity Management, SAP has done a major step in enhancing its products to allow customers to implement standards-based, interoperable and cross domain Single Sign-On and reduce administrative effort and TCO.”

“For UNINETT, complying with open standards is very important, and we’ve been working for open standards on the Internet ever since we were founded,” says CEO Petter Kongshaug, UNINETT. “UNINETT operates the national identity infrastructure for education and research, and for our customers it’s reassuring to know that our common infrastructure is based upon state of the art software. The Kantara testing programme has been very useful to us.”

View the Test Results

View the Final Report

List of Participants:
CA Technologies
· Implementation: CA Federation Manager – http://www.ca.com/products/detail/CA-Federation-Manager.aspx
· Specific model/version: 12.5
· Profiles: IdP Lite, SP Lite, eGov 1.5

IBM Corporation
· Implementation: IBM Tivoli Federated Identity Manager – http://www-01.ibm.com/software/tivoli/products/federated-identity-mgr/
· Specific model/version: Version 6 Release 2
· Profiles: IDP, IDP Lite, SP, SP Lite, eGov 1.5, POST Binding

SAP AG
· Implementation: NetWeaver Application Server – http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/nw-identitymanagement
· Specific model/version: ABAP 7.02
· Profiles: SP Lite, eGov 1.5

SAP AG
· Implementation: NetWeaver Identity Management – http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/nw-identitymanagement
· Specific model/version: 7.2
· Profiles: IDP, IDP Lite, SP, SP Lite, eGov 1.5, POST Binding

UNINETT
· Implementation: SimpleSAMLphp – http://simplesamlphp.org/
· Specific model/version: Version 1.8
· Profiles: IDP Lite, SP Lite

About Kantara Initiative
http://kantarainitiative.org/

About Drummond Group Inc. (DGI)
http://www.drummondgroup.com/

###

Media Contact
Dervla O’Reilly
+1-415-731-4487
dervla[at]kantarainitiative[dot]org

The IDDYs will be presented today at the Identity Collaboration Day jointly produced by Kantara Initiative and Identity Commons in San Francisco, CA.

“As the speed of innovation accelerates in the Identity Management arena, new business models and use cases are emerging,” says Matthew Gardiner, Director CA Security Business & President, Kantara Initiative. “The IDDY Awards formally recognizes these innovations and their contributions to the digital identity management marketplace.”

Now in its fifth year, the IDDY program has grown within Kantara Initiative to recognize the individuals and organizations developing identity-enabled applications built using any open identity technology. The IDDYs recognize two categories of achievement: ID Deployment and Emerging Applications. The ID Deployment category spotlights applications that are currently delivering significant and quantifiable identity management value to organizations and users. The Emerging Applications category showcases “up-and-coming” applications and proof-of-concepts driving the next generation of digital identity management solutions.

Judges evaluated nominations based on criteria that include the benefits applications deliver to communities, businesses, governments and people; the ROI the application demonstrates; and how the solution may successfully address identity issues such as reducing identity theft, meeting regulatory requirements, and providing users with increased security and privacy protection.

Winner in the ID Deployment Category: NIH iTrust
“We are pleased to win the Deployment category as this means recognition of NIH’s leadership in accepting open standards-based third party identity credentials at US government websites,” said Debbi Bucci, NIH Integration Services Center Manager, Center for Information Technology (CIT).

NIH iTrust is multi-protocol enterprise authentication service that allows users to access multiple applications with a single third-party user credential. NIH iTrust enables federated identity management, allowing users both within and outside of NIH to access multiple applications and data sources across agencies, using their local identity credentials. It provides application owners with an easy and secure way to authenticate users and control access to sensitive data by leveraging third-party SAML and OpenID based credentials. More information about the project is available at https://federation.nih.gov/itrust/

Winner in the Emerging Applications/Proof of Concept Category: Newcastle University
“With the increased amount of services available on the Web, the end user is no longer able to easily control access to their distributed data and is often paying the price in both privacy and convenience” said Maciej Machulak who leads the SMART project. “User-Managed Access and SMART aim to provide a solution to this problem. These approaches allow people to apply the necessary security and privacy controls to their personal data while retaining all the benefits of social interactions and data sharing that the Web environment offers.”

SMART solution is the first Java implementation of the User-Managed Access (UMA) protocol developed at Newcastle University as part of a JISC-funded project. It allows users to have centralised, flexible and fine-grained control over access to their personal information on the Web. Users define their sharing preferences at a single Authorization Manager using an intuitive user interface for creating identity-based and claims-based policies. Such sharing settings can be later applied to distributed data hosted by UMA-enabled Web applications, such as the online storage and gallery services provided as part of the SMART solution. More information about the project is available at http://smartjisc.wordpress.com and http://www.tinyurl.com/uma-wg

About the Kantara Initiative 2011 IDDY Award Judging Panel

The IDDY Awards judging panel is comprised of ten identity management and privacy and policy experts from around the globe, working collectively to evaluate applications that follow specified judging criteria:
- J. Trent Adams, Trust and Identity Outreach Specialist, Internet Society
- Bob Bragdon, Publisher, CSO Magazine
- Philippe Clement, Head of Identity Marketing, Orange – FT
- Matthew Gardiner, Director CA Security Business & Kantara Initiative President
- Gerry Gebel, President, Axiomatics
- Leif Johansson, Systems Specialist at NORDUnet & SUNET
- Nate Klinginstein, Senior Technical Analyst, Internet2
- Martin Kuppinger, Founder and Principle Analyst, Kuppinger, Cole & Partner
- Nat Sakimura, Senior Researcher, NRI
- Don Thibeau, Chairman, OIX

About Kantara Initiative
Kantara Initiative is a global, open, public-private, technology-agnostic forum comprised of identity ecosystem stakeholders. Its inspired mission is to promote technical interoperability and harmonization; to develop policy frameworks for operational interoperability and to provide certification and assessment programs to grow trust in the standards, products, and service deployments. For more information about getting involved in Kantara Initiative, visit http://kantarainitiative.org/

###

Media Contact
Joni Brennan
Kantara Initiative
joni@kantarainitiative.org
+1 732-226-4223

This effort was initiated within Kantara Initiative’s Telecommunications Work Group (TIWG) and while it is focusing on telecoms use-cases, many of the outcome should be reusable by other large scale identity users: governments, banks, web-2.0, etc. The end goal is to implement a cookbook detailed enough to enable implementation a reference architectures compliant with either its full or partial model.

• Watch the short overview video here – presented by Fulup Ar Foll
• Review the introduction PDF outlined here – presented by Fulup Ar Foll

The Kantara Initiative European Use Case and Market Discussion Group (EUM DG). The purpose of this discussion group is to identify and raise awareness of Use Cases that are of particular importance to Federation and Identity systems in the European Union market. The convener of this group is Serge Ravet.

For more information on the European Use Case and Market Discussion Group, please visit the home page here

· Join the Group 
· Review the Charter
· Mail list and Archives
· Designated IPR Policy options for operation – the Creative Commons Share Alike Attribution IPR Policy option

The Kantara Initiative Business Cases for Trusted Federation Discussion Group (BCTF DG). The purpose of this discussion group is to identify and raise awareness of Business Cases for the deployment and adoption of Federation models – particularly the Trust Framework model. The convener of this group is Rainer Hoerbe.

For more information on the Business Cases for Trusted Federation Discussion Group, please visit the home page here

· Join the Group
· Review the Charter
· Mail list and Archives
· Designated IPR Policy options for operation – the Creative Commons Share Alike Attribution IPR Policy option

ANYONE may participate in a Kantara Initiative Discussion Group (DG) or Work Group (WG). If you or your colleagues would like to join this group, you will simply need to complete the Group Participation Agreement here for either group. Stay tuned for details of kick-off calls for both groups.

(NOTE: joining Kantara Initiative as a Member does not automatically enroll you as a Participant in any particular DG or WG — you must specifically join those groups in which you choose to participate):

If you have any questions about the Kantara Initiative or how to get involved please don’t hesitate to send us a message (support@kantarainitiative.org) or use our contact form

When: Monday February 14th, prior to RSA North America

Register and get the early-bird rate before January 14, 2011

This event is being jointly produced by the Kantara Initiative and IIW producers (Doc Searls, Phil Windley and Kaliya Hamlin) – Identity Commons.

Join us in connecting the big enterprise resources with individual contributors (big and small) The focus of this event will be to explore the emerging synergies between the user-centric and enterprise communities.

On-going perceptions of a struggle between these two communities have been written about and explored by some of the brightest minds in the identity management and privacy spaces. However, given this event takes place on Valentine’s Day the, Identity Collaboration Day will take the inverse approach and focus on what these groups actually have in common and how we can, and ARE, working together to leverage the sweet spots within both areas of approach. We hope that you’ll join us in working to dispel negative competitive perceptions and work towards harmonized approaches for the good of all!

We imagine a whole range of interesting topics that user-centric and enterprise communities contribute to will be put forth. You can see the range of topics covered at the most recent IIW in November here on their wiki. Kantara’s current list of working groups is here and latest announcements can be found here.

So…. if you are involved in the Identity Commons or Kantara Initiative, OIX, Open ID or Information Cards come and spend a day collaborating together!

Like IIW, the agenda will be created live the day of the event by the participants. Ideas for session topics are gathered as attendees register and they will be shared online leading up to the event.

Due to the many different activities happening on the Monday before RSA, we have divided the day into 2 distinct sessions – morning and afternoon. Tickets are available for the entire day or for just the Morning or Afternoon session. Agenda creation will happen a second time just after lunch at the beginning of the Afternoon session.

The venue is in downtown San Francisco, just a short walking distance, cab or subway ride from the RSA event at Moscone Center.

Schedule
8:00 AM Registration – Breakfast
9:00 – 9:30 Agenda Creation Part 1
9:30 – 10:30 Session 1
10:30 – 11:30 Session 2
11:30 -12:30 Session 3
12:30 Lunch & Registration for Afternoon Session - – We plan to serve a tasty and easily transportable box lunch!

1:00-1:30 Kantara Initiative IDDY Awards Ceremony

1:30 – 2:00 Agenda Creation Part 2
2:00 – 3:00 Session 4
3:00 – 4:00 Session 5
4:00 – 5:00 Session 6
5:00 – 5:30 Closing
5:30 – 6:30 Social Hour Immediately Following the Closing Session

Hailing from Canada, Mark now lives in London, England. Mark’s has an interesting education studying in computer science, network engineering, law and sociology. Mark worked in technical security, testing token authentication and RADIUS servers. He also worked at Entrust, which was an enterprise PKI (encryption) organization. Since then, Mark’s efforts and interests have been in the trust side of identity.

In Mark’s spare time he enjoys family & friends, playing the drums, and traveling. Learn more about Mark here

Find out about Kantara’s P3WG and how to become involved here

eGovernment
Congratulations to Colin Wallis and Fulup Ar Foll on their re-elections as Chairman and Vice Chairman.

Information Sharing
Congratulations to Joe Andieu and Iain Henderson on their re-election as Co-chairs.

Universal Login Experience
Paul Trevithick and Bob Morgan and on their re-election as Co-chairs of the ULX WG as well as Philippe Clement who joined leadership when Identity Provider Selection WG merged with ULX.

Identity Assurance
Frank Villavicencio and a newly elected Myisha Frasier-McElveen as Co-Chairs.

We offer our support and congratulations again to everyone as they carry the work of Kantara forward.