IBM Research is developing the next generation of Internet based Identity Management services. Identity 2.0 is based on the concept of user-centric identity management, supporting enhanced identity verification and privacy, and user consent and control over any access to personal information for Internet-based transactions.
An important aspect of Identity 2.0 is protection against increasingly common and sophisticated phishing attacks as well as the inadvertant disclosure of confidential information while enabling convenient management and consistent use of user identity and profile information.
A team consisting of researchers from IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center and Zurich Research Laboratory are working to define standards (WS-Trust, WS-SecurityPolicy, WS-Federation) and initial implementations of components necessary to realize this vision.
IBM Research is collaborating on the overall design and implementation of the Eclipse Higgins Trust Framework, an open source identity management framework. Higgins enables users and systems to integrate identity, profile, and relationship information across multiple heterogeneous systems , such as Microsoft CardSpace, Liberty, OpenID, etc. Higgins enables developers to write to a common Identity Management API, rather than needing to support multiple identity management systems. Software applications incorporating Higgins will allow people to store their digital identities and profile information in places of their choice and to share the stored information with companies and other parties in a controlled fashion.
Specific IBM Research contributions to Higgins include the Security Token Service (STS) and associated extensions for SAML and Username Tokens. Additional contributions are planned for Policy Languages, User Interface, and idemix, X.509, and Kerberos Token extensions.
IBM Research continues to maintain a high profile in the Identity 2.0 community through active participation in the IdentityGang, Open Source Identity Selector (OSIS), and PRIME efforts. We continue to seek opportunities to collaborate with partners in industry and academia in this exciting area.
Last updated 19 Jan 2007