The
International Telecommunication
Union (ITU) has set up an identity management working group to
help bring together the different federated identity management
standards.
The ITU said the use of multiple usernames and passwords
represented a boon to hackers, identity thieves and other
cybercriminals, and was causing substantial financial loss for
companies and individuals.
The organisation aims to develop a “technology- and
platform-independent solution” to promote the use of single sign-on
federated identity management.
The new ITU focus group on identity management is open to
national bodies, companies and individuals to share their knowledge
and co-ordinate their identity management.
The aim, said the ITU, was to bring interoperability to
solutions by providing an open mechanism that would let different
identity management solutions communicate with each other, even as
each different solution continued to evolve.
Such a "trust-metric" system has not existed until now,
according to the ITU, which said interoperability between existing
solutions would provide significant benefits, such as increased
trust by users of online services, as well as improved
cybersecurity, less spam, and seamless "nomadic" roaming between
services worldwide.
Abbie Barbir, chairman of the ITU's identity management working
group, and Nortel’s standards adviser, said, "Our main focus is on
how to achieve the common goals of the telecommunications and
identity management communities. Nobody can go it alone in this
space - a system must have global acceptance. There is now a common
understanding that we can achieve this goal."
However, the ITU’s work may already have been usurped by the
Open ID system. Microsoft, AOL and a host of other large players
have recently given their support to this initiative.
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