Liberty Alliance Presents First Annual IDDY Awards for Excellence in Identity Management
Deutsche Telekom AG (T-Com, Business Unit T-Online), EduTech and the UK Government receive the 2006 Identity Deployment of the Year Award
Friday, September 15, 2006
Liberty Alliance – September 13, 2006 -- Liberty Alliance, the global identity consortium working to build a more trusted Internet for consumers, governments and businesses worldwide, today announced that Deutsche Telekom AG (T-Com, Business Unit T-Online), EduTech and the UK Government have won the 2006 IDDY (Identity Deployment of the Year) Award. After reviewing nominations from organizations representing a variety of industries and vertical market segments, the IDDY judging panel made up of identity experts from around the world has selected these organizations as IDDY Award winners for delivering excellence in identity management today. A photo of the Liberty Alliance IDDY Award is available at http://www.projectliberty.org/about/iddyaward.php
“The IDDY Award recognizes the Liberty Alliance-based deployments that are delivering significant identity management value to businesses, governments, citizens and consumers around the world,” said George Goodman, president of the Liberty Alliance management board and director of the platform capabilities lab at Intel. “We salute EduTech, T-Online and the UK government as leaders in building and deploying identity solutions users can trust for more secure and privacy-respecting online transactions.”
IDDY Award nominations were evaluated based on criteria that include the benefits deployments are delivering to organizations and users; the ROI the application is demonstrating; and how the solution may successfully address key identity issues such as reducing identity theft, meeting regulatory requirements or providing consumers with increased privacy protection. This year’s IDDY Award recipients have successfully deployed Circles of Trust (the legal, business and policy agreements governing federation) and Liberty-enabled technologies in the education, government and service provider sectors.
Deutsche Telekom AG (T-Com, Business Unit T-Online) - T-Com, launched “T-Online Netzausweis” (English: Net ID Card) in 2005 to bring the benefits of federated identity management to its customers and partners. The Liberty-enabled federated system provides consumers with easy, secure and privacy-respecting access to applications and services and partners with new opportunities for reducing costs and increasing revenues.
- Deployment – Currently supports nearly 12 million customers and over 200 products in the telecom internet service provider sector, including gaming, Web-hosting, IP-TV and IP-Telephony.
- Circle of Trust – The T-Online “Netzausweis” requires a Circle of Trust across all its partners established in the context of exchange of a user’s personal data between the parties.
- User-Centric Capabilities – Consumers control all of their identity information with privacy controls built into the system. Features include single log-in/sign-on, auto identification and authentication, data vault, age verification and single log-out.
- Highlights - Mass market deployment in 2005, provides consumers with increased protection against identity theft, allows for quick and cost-efficient link-up with partners and seamless services on one single platform.
- Interoperable Federation Technologies – The extension of T-Online’s existing authentication interface according to the Liberty Alliance standard ID-FF 1.2 (Identity Federation Framework) facilitates the connection to existing IDM-environments which are also ID-FF 1.2 conformant. For instance, connecting a partner who uses Sun Access / Identity Manager ID-FF 1.2 implementation to T-Online´s SourceID-based ID-FF 1.2 implementation is NOT about complete integration, rather just configure-and-play.
EduTech – EduTech is deploying Liberty Federation within the New York state education agencies, working in collaboration with 11 other Regional Information Centers (RICs) that are responsible for providing technology services to 700+ public school districts in New York. This RIC Consortium is leveraging federation in order to increase teacher and administrator access to tools and information, enhance system-wide data initiatives and lower state-wide operational costs.
· Deployment – Federation currently touches nearly 10,000 teachers and administrators through various instructional analysis tools and portals.
· Circle of Trust – EduTech has deployed a Circle of Trust between all regional educational centers in the State of New York.
· User-Centric Capabilities – administrators, teachers and students authenticate and sign-on once to securely access a variety of educational services
· Highlights - Deployed across New York state educational system in 2005; provides secure application access and sharing across districts, allows for new state-wide educational partnerships and is providing significant IT and administrative cost savings throughout the New York educational system.
· Interoperable Federation Technologies – Ping Federate
UK Government Cabinet Office - The UK Government Gateway Authentication Service leverages federation to secure the electronic delivery of government services to citizens across the UK, enable authentication and single sign-on in support of a “joined up government” and to break down technical silos that had previously been hindering a transition to eGovernment.
- Deployment – The Government Gateway Authentication Service has been designed as the authentication server for all e-government services in the UK. Nearly eight million citizens in the UK are registered to use the gateway service.
- Circle of Trust –The Gateway provides authentication services on behalf of multiple other public-sector bodies, based on trust principles established in UK e-government legislation. The Gateway also supports a “tiered” authentication scheme according to the level of assurance provided by the user enrolment process and the type of credentials issued.
- User-Centric Capabilities – The project has been developed to provide citizens and businesses with ease-of-use capabilities for accessing a variety of UK government services; not only does the Gateway provide a single authentication and entry-point for online government services, it now supports the predominant open standards on the market, making it easier for public sector bodies to integrate its authentication capability with their own service provision systems.
- Highlights - Deployment supports all federation standards to allow for complete interoperability between government agencies nationwide, there is less need for each local authority to develop or implement its own secure authentication mechanism. The Gateway provides local authorities with a single, consistent and robust security mechanism at minimal cost and effort on their part.
- Interoperable Federation Technologies – A principal aim of this project was to reduce the cost and complexity experienced by government departments and other public sector bodies (such as Local Authorities) in making use of the centralized authentication service. To that end, the Gateway was enhanced to support both WS-Federation and the Liberty Alliance Identity Federation Framework standards. This delivers a level of interoperability and protocol-independence which greatly simplifies the task of integrating service-provision systems with the Gateway's authentication functions. It also means the Gateway can deliver consistent authentication to its users without requiring them all to adopt a single standard, which could potentially alienate a substantial segment of the user-base.
This year’s IDDY Award winners are among the Liberty-based deployments helping to drive the over one-billion Liberty-enabled identities and devices Liberty Alliance is expecting this year. A snapshot of organizations deploying Liberty Federation and Liberty Web Services is available at http://projectliberty.org/about/marketadoption.php. Interoperability of identity products and solutions from multiple vendors is playing an important role in advancing the successful deployment of Liberty Federation and Liberty Web Services. Nearly 75 products from vendors around the world have now passed interoperability testing since Liberty launched its Liberty Interoperable™ program in 2003. A list of vendors and products that have passed testing is available at http://projectliberty.org/activities/conformant_products.php.
“The IDDYs are about recognizing the individuals and organizations solving real-world identity problems based on the proven interoperable and privacy-respecting capabilities of Liberty Federation and Liberty Web Services,” said Brett McDowell, director of the Liberty Alliance. “The winners of the 2006 IDDY Awards are demonstrating the business value organizations and consumers around the world are realizing with open identity specifications from the Liberty Alliance.”
About the Liberty Alliance IDDY Awards and 2006 Judges
The IDDY Awards are presented annually by Liberty Alliance to shine a spotlight on outstanding digital identity management deployments worldwide. The panel of judges for the 2006 Awards was made up of the following identity experts from within and outside of Liberty’s global membership base: Michael Barrett, CISO, PayPal, Inc.; John Fontana, senior editor, infrastructure, Network World; Gerry Gebel, service director-IdPS, Burton Group; George Goodman, president of the Liberty Alliance management board and director of the platform capabilities lab at Intel; Paul Madsen, co-chair of the Liberty Alliance technology expert group and identity standards researcher at NTT, Robin Wilton, Co-chair of the Liberty Alliance public policy expert group and corporate architect at Sun Microsystems; Christine Varney, partner, Hogan & Hartson, Washington, D.C. More information about the 2006 IDDY Awards is available at http://projectliberty.org/activities/deployment_award.php The IDDY Award has been designed by Kristian Iglesias, a sculptor living and working in Greenport, New York.
###
CONTACT:
Russ DeVeau
Liberty Alliance
508-487-6102 – Office
908-251-1549 – Mobile
russ.deveau@verizon.net
