High Assurance Consumer Identity

Issue/Topic: High Assurance Consumer Identity (T1G)

Convener and Note-taker: Bob Pinheiro

Conference: IIW-East September 9-10, 2010 in Washington DC Complete Set of Notes

Tags for the session - technology discussed/ideas considered:

Authentication, credentials, tokens, high assurance, trust frameworks, selectors, active clients, consumer identity

Discussion notes, key understandings, outstanding questions, observations, and, if appropriate to this discussion: action items, next steps:

High value online services that involve financial transactions or payments, including the establishment of new high value relationships and accounts, are subject to a great deal of fraud. With the advent of electronic patient records and personal data stores, the opportunities for harm to consumers as a result of fraudulent access to sensitive information becomes even greater.

While consumers may not necessarily articulate a “need” to carry around hard tokens or other forms of high assurance identity credentials to deal with these problems, they would almost certainly state a need to prevent others from “stealing their identities” by breaking into their bank accounts, obtaining new credit cards in their name, or accessing other sensitive personal information. These needs can only be met when strong authentication technologies and “open identity” concepts can be combined to create high assurance consumer identity solutions in a way that is easy for consumers to use and understand, and that protects consumer’s privacy as well.

The folllowing presentation outlines some the work undertaken by the Kantara Initiative’s Consumer Identity Workgroup towards achieving these goals.