Category: Identity

[Dave Birch] The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) is backing a new initiative on online identity management.  The ITU Focus Group on Identity Management aims to bring "global harmony to identity management" through a technology and platform-independent solution because it believes the use of multiple usernames and passwords is a boon for hacking, identity theft and other forms of cyber crime.  I couldn’t agree more.  How this is to be achieved, though, is another matter.  It’s not clear to me how this initiative differs from all of the other initiatives but more effort is always welcome.  The ITU initiative says that it will bring together key players in identity management including developers, software vendors, standards forums, manufacturers, telecom firms and academia.  They aim to promote interoperability among systems by providing an open mechanism based on a ‘trust-metric’ system that will allow different identity management solutions to communicate.  I’m looking forward to learning more, starting by contributing to their wiki if I can.

Technorati Tags: identity, PKI, security

Continue reading “Yet another identity initiative”

[Dave Birch] It looks as if Forum friend Max Most was right when she expressed doubts about the trajectory of the Department of Homeland Security’s US-VISIT program last November.  According to a Government Accounting Office (GAO) report the  US-VISIT program’s costs are spiraling out of control.  Accenture were awarded a $10 billion contract for US-VISIT back in 2004, and it is intended as a border control system. A digital photo and fingerprints are taken when foreigners enter the US (after standing in a queue for hours, as many of us have experienced) and these are "checked" against a government watchlists stored in a "hodgepodge of backend databases."  But there’s virtually no system in place to know when visitors have left the country.

Technorati Tags: biometrics, ID cards, identity

Continue reading “Unwelcome VISITors”

[Dave Birch] I was in a conversation with someone in the identity management field earlier today and he made the point that most identity management implementations today are really just single sign-on with go-faster stripes.  I think this is true, but that doesn’t, I think, mean that they are not worthwhile.  Every survey shows that one of the simplest, and most immediate, elements of an identity management business case has to be the flood of ID-related calls to help desks!  That survey, in fact, reports that forty per cent of help desk calls originate from an identity management problem.  It goes on to say "Despite many organisations putting greater resources into identity management, the problem is putting massive strain on firms".  So clearly greater resources (what are these resources?  coal mines?  hydroelectric power?) are not in themselves a solution.

Technorati Tags: identity

Continue reading “Help!”

[Dave Birch] There’s a real problem.  Perverts are using e-mail and instant messaging to contact children and lure them into dangerous situations.  Politicians need to find a solution — one, naturally, that will attract good newspaper headlines but not involve actually having to learn anything about the dynamics of the (complicated) problem — so they come up with an absolute corker.  Get perverts to register their e-mail addresses and IM names.  Home Secretary John Reid has also ordered work to be carried out, presumably by management consultants, on the feasibility of an online alarm system which would notify police every time a convicted paedophile used their registered details to log on to an internet chatroom, or any other site which could be used to "groom" victims.  Well, that’s that taken care of then, on to world hunger.

Technorati Tags: identity

Continue reading “Don’t use pervert@gov.uk”

[Dave Birch]  In a recent meeting, a client remarked that their customer had expressed an interest in purchasing an identity management solution but had been quite unable to articulate what an identity management solution might do, or even what problem it might fix.  This reminded me that a while ago Digital ID World pointed me to an article by Paul Murphy noting out that one of the basic issues with identity management is the interpretation of the words used (mainly "identity" and "management").  What an excellent precis  of the current situation.

Technorati Tags: identity, management

Continue reading “Get me some of that identity management!”