Authorization Standards Workshop Also Being Held at Burton Group Catalyst Conference North America 2010.

Piscataway, NJ, July 19, 2010 – Kantara Initiative, an open forum providing identity ecosystem members the opportunity to collaboratively address harmonization and interoperability challenges that exist between identity systems, Web 2.0 applications and services, and Web-based initiatives, is participating in an Open Identity for Business Interop demonstration and an Authorization Standards Workshop at this year’s Burton Catalyst event in San Diego, on July 27.

Kantara Initiative is collaborating with members of the OpenID Foundation, the Information Card Foundation, the Open Identity Exchange, and Identity Commons to demonstrate uses of open identity as a business enabler in the Open Identity for Business Interop. This event will showcase:

• Practical applications of the work activity of the US Identity, Credential and Access Management (ICAM) Subcommittee, National Institutes of Health, and their partners
• Examples of using different levels of assurance across multiple trust federations
• Illustrations of how open identity is moving to mobile devices and enabling new types of mobile applications
• New browser-based applications that use identity services to automate cross-site user experiences

“Today’s organizations have new choices when it comes to working with the identities of their partners, citizens, suppliers, and customers – choices that can reduce costs, increase trust and create new business opportunities,” says Don Thibeau, Chairman of the Open Identity Exchange. “The Open Identity Exchange is collaborating with the Kantara Initiative and others on the Open Identity for Business Interop featured at this year’s Catalyst conference to show tangible examples of how identity services can enable business at multiple levels of assurance and across multiple protocols and multiple federations.”

“The use cases highlighted during this workshop held at Burton Catalyst are excellent examples of how Kantara Initiative works openly with the Identity community to fulfill its mission to foster interoperability, innovation and broad adoption through the development of open identity specifications and education programs,” added John Bradley, an independent ID management consultant and chairman of Kantara Initiative’s Federation Interoperability working group.

Kantara Initiative is also spearheading the Authorization Standards Workshop to be held on July 27th at 12:30pm PDT. This interactive workshop will explore the most current developments and trends in authorization standards, including OAuth (a community initiative now being standardized within the IETF), User-Managed Access (being developed within the Kantara Initiative) and XACML (an OASIS standard). Workshop attendees will also examine some authorization use cases that may drive new standards requirements.

“A combination of presentations, panels and demonstrations given by Kantara Initiative members will demonstrate how existing and emerging authorization standards fit into the enterprise and social web infrastructure,” says Paul Madsen, identity management researcher, NTT and Kantara Initiative chairman for Concordia DG and ID-WSF Evolution WG.

If you are interested in attending the Authorization Standards Workshop, please RSVP to Dervla O’Reilly, dervla[at]kantarainitiative[dot]org.

About Kantara Initiative
Kantara Initiative is a global, open, public-private, technology-agnostic forum comprised of identity ecosystem stakeholders. Kantara initiative’s 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. Kantara Initiative freely provides the governance and resources whereby diverse members of the ecosystem successfully collaborate on a diverse portfolio of common policy frameworks, technical specifications and deployment guidelines driven by the identity community, industry and governments from around the world. For more information about getting involved in Kantara Initiative, visit http://kantarainitiative.org/.

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Media Contact
Michelle Hunt
Kantara Initiative
Michelle.Hunt@ieee-isto.org
+1 732 981-3434

On behalf of Frank Villavicencio, chair of the Identity Assurance WG.  Also published at Frank Villavicencio’s blog page.

First off, I would like to would like to express my sympathy to those affected by the terrible earthquake that hit Chile this past weekend.

Envio mi palabra de aliento y de optimismo al pueblo Chileno. Tengo muy buenos amigos Chilenos y a todos les deseo lo mejor en vista de estas circunstancias, a sus familias y a todos los afectados… Las cosas de Dios son sin duda alguna indescrifrables.

In this blog post, I would like to share with you some recent developments in the world of identity assurance, which as you know from my recent blog posts: “Identity Assurance, an everyday life issue” part 1 and part 2, is a top of mind issue for me and for us here at Identropy. Quite frankly, I could not hope for better timing for these blogs to come about.

On Friday February 26th, 2010 the US Federal Government’s Identity, Credential, and Access Management (ICAM) Trust Framework Evaluation Team (TFET) reviewed Kantara Initiative‘s latest submission and granted it Provisional Approval as a Trust Framework Provider at Levels 1, 2 & non-crypto Level 3 under the Open Identity Solutions for Open Government program.  The removal of the provisional status will hinge on the release by TFET of additional guidance for assessors concerning privacy and Kantara’s adoption of this guidance.

This is for me an extraordinary milestone, not only in my role of Chair of the Identity Assurance Work Group, but as an identity assurance activist altogether.  Kantara submitted its application for the US Federal Government adoption of the Identity Assurance Framework (IAF) in November of 2009. Prior to that date, the IAWG has been working very hard, collaborating with Kantara and the Assurance Review Board (who oversees the Kantara Initiative Identity Assurance Certification Program) to achieve this important goal (albeit still under provisional status).

The significance of this milestone is that it represents an important step towards fostering the adoption of identity-enabled Government services at known levels of assurance, relying on identity credentials issued and managed by non-Government parties (referred to as Credential Service Providers in the IAF). It will create the right conditions for the certification program to be adopted in real-life scenarios and for the industry to benefit from a proven, best-of-breed certification program that effectively enables interoperability and trust. This means that the IAF will not be just a “paper” standard, incarnated in a compendium of documents, but an actual technology-agnostic program that organizations can certify against.

With the adoption of risk-based models, identity federation can achieve Internet scale, and facilitate public access to online information at specific levels of assurance.  With adoption will also come economies of scale and further collaboration and interoperability across industries and Governments.

As someone who has been involved in identity management and identity assurance for quite some time, I cannot help but feel excited about the times I live in, and optimistic about what is to come.

I do anticipate and hope for more endorsements of the IAF in the near future by other organizations, and more importantly, the start of a paradigm shift in the way we all think about identity, both within the Enterprise and in a federated environment.  Ultimately, this path will allow the identerati to focus on the real end goal: delivering identity-enabled solutions and services with the level of trust and confidence that is appropriate for the transactions being performed.

But this is just a first step…

Frank