White House Unveils Plans For "Trusted Identities In Cyberspace"

Presto Vivace writes with news that the Obama administration's cyber-security coordinater, Howard Schmidt, yesterday unveiled a national plan for "trusted" online identities. Schmidt wrote, "The NSTIC, which is in response to one of the near term action items in the President’s Cyberspace Policy Review, calls for the creation of an online environment, or an Identity Ecosystem as we refer to it in the strategy, where individuals and organizations can complete online transactions with confidence, trusting the identities of each other and the identities of the infrastructure that the transaction runs on. For example, no longer should individuals have to remember an ever-expanding and potentially insecure list of usernames and passwords to login into various online services. Through the strategy we seek to enable a future where individuals can voluntarily choose to obtain a secure, interoperable, and privacy-enhancing credential (e.g., a smart identity card, a digital certificate on their cell phone, etc.) from a variety of service providers — both public and private — to authenticate themselves online for different types of transactions (e.g., online banking, accessing electronic health records, sending email, etc.)." You can read the full draft of the plan (PDF), and the White House is seeking public comments on it as well.

Comments

Got a link?

[paiute]

I need to download a German accented voice so when my computer says, "Your papers, please." it will sound authentic.

Sounds great!

[Zedrick]

I wish my government would do something similar, like calling for the creation of flying ponies for everyone. No, wait - flying invisible ponies for everyone! I'm sure there would be no problem getting reality to comply with government wishes.

Re:OpenID?

[BitterOak]

The owner is forbidden to know or control the key locking and controlling his devices.

Do you have a credit card? One of the newer ones with a chip inside? If so, you own a device with private keys locked inside which you don't have access to. This is just an extension of that idea to identity management on a computer. It's not nearly as scary as you make it out to be.