Global Identity Foundation launches quest to develop global digital identity ecosystem

The Global Identity Foundation (GIF) has issued a call to action to the security industry to collaborate on the development of a new, global solution for digital identities that will aid in solving a whole range of cyber security problems.

Launched as a global not-for-profit organisation and building on work from the Jericho Forum including the Jericho Forum’s Identity, Entitlement & Access Management (IdEA) Commandments, the GIF’s mission is to bring vendors and security experts together in a neutral environment to develop a single, open source, globally accepted, digital identity ecosystem – Identity 3.0 – for secure and trusted online and offline transactions.

“Digital identity is broken. Online credit card fraud, phishing, and cybercrime all succeed by fraudulently using someone else’s identity and users are rightly concerned about access to their personal information. In 2014 alone, millions of user records were stolen through data breaches including at Sony, eBay, and JP Morgan. In a world where we shop and bank online, and share personal details on social media, we urgently need to move beyond passwords and basic web security,” said Paul Simmonds, CEO of the GIF and ex co-founder and board member of the Jericho Forum. “What people want is a simple solution that will put them back in control of who they trust in their digital lives. Identity 3.0 has the potential to stop much of the cybercrime going on today,” he added.

Identity 3.0 is the overarching ecosystem, being developed to allow existing and new identity technologies - utilising existing standards and cryptography - to co-exist in a decentralised global framework.

The idea behind Identity 3.0 is to be able to understand the context in which an entity – a person, device, code, agent, or organisation – is operating, to a known level of trust. The entities (typically a person) only share the attributes and information that is essential to the transaction they want to undertake. This allows the parties involved in the transaction to make a risk-based decision about whether to transact, or whether they require additional information before proceeding. All of this happens in the background, invisible to the user, or with minimal interaction.

The GIF is actively looking for vendors, academics and security experts to contribute to the continued development of Identity 3.0 as research sponsors and partners. In the first project phase, the GIF will define practical use scenarios, future directions for development, and run pilot projects to determine the viability for a global deployment of the solution.

”Collaboration in a vendor neutral environment is key to making this work globally,” said Dr Steve Moyle, COO of the Global Identity Foundation. “We need to be able to answer key questions such as ‘will the Chinese accept a US identity and vice versa’ and ‘can I verify that identity attributes are authoritative’. Solving these and other identity problems is of benefit to all companies and governments on the planet today.”