At the ID Workshop leading into the RSA Conference, we announced the impending formation of the Kantara Initiative. To those following the Identity Community, this wasn’t really ground-breaking news as we’ve been working on this for the past year or so (under various monikers). What was worth mentioning in the workshop, however, was that we’d signed a number of founding member organizations (including the Information Card Foundation, Internet Society, DataPortability Project, XDI.org, Project Concordia) and put out a call for more to join before the launch in a few months. Oh, and we settled on the name.
After much (much) debate, the founders settled on the name Kantara as it is a Swahili word for “bridge” and has Arabic roots meaning “harmony”. And yes, we know that some people believe it should be spelled “Qantara” (while others want to add a trailing “h” on the end, too). In the end, there was strong support for the name as it blends key points of the group’s mission to:
Foster identity community harmonization, interoperability, innovation, and broad adoption through the development of open identity specifications, operational frameworks, education programs, deployment and usage best practices for privacy-respecting, secure access to online services.
Beyond the announcement itself, the bridge-building we hope to facilitate already struck a positive chord throughout the RSA Conference. Of the meetings I attended, here are a list of them where Kantara was mentioned (either by the presenters or in audience questions):
- Fostering Collaboration and Opportunities in Identity Management
- Federate Access Policy, Not Identity
- Building Authorization into the Enterprise Identity System
- Cloud Computing and Identity Challenges
- Identity Management for the Cloud: Challenges, Opportunities, and Best Practices
- Identity and Privacy Models
In each case, the comments were positive and hopeful. Like opening a new birthday present, the IdM professionals were excited to play with the new group. Our goal, of course, is to make sure the Kantara Initiative lives up to our collectively high expectations. Taking a page out of the Concordia playbook, the initiative will provide neutral ground for all participants. There is no cost for participation, and all contributors are welcome. The playing field is level, and we’re excited to see what projects take advantage of the unique opportunity to have a truly open dialog.
The Tweet Race: As you can tell from the photo to the right, Eve Maler (a.k.a. @xmlgrrl) was apparently happy that her Kantara announcement Tweet beat mine. I’m relatively convinced, however, that she cheated by typing her’s in advance (only needing to hit “send” from the stage), while I had to type mine on the spot. In fact, her announcement blog post also won. Hmmph.
April 24th, 2009 | 
User-Managed Identity Starts at Home
About 8 years ago I took on the challenge of securing the digital borders around the e-commerce systems for the Kraft Group’s sports properties. At that time, I could see a storm cloud gathering on the networked horizon as we built a system to unify all of the current properties and set the foundation to build out a series of interconnected portal communities. Looking forward, I knew that it was only a matter of time before a major press-worthy event would raise everyone’s awareness regarding the protection of user privacy, in the form of personally identifiable information (PII), and associated payment information.
Our business strategy was to build a core commerce engine that could handle online transactions embedded within each separate portal. Key to our success was enabling users to have a persistent identity throughout their engagement with our products. In this way we could minimize the barriers to their interacting with our content, as well as streamlining the purchase pipeline. Essentially, once users logged into any of our portals (to access premium/personalized content, manage accounts, and purchase products), we were able to effectively cater to them by simplifying their experience.
The problem with this single-sign-on model was that if a user account was compromised, the intruder could have free reign over the victim’s PII and associated payment information. I had to make the case for going the extra mile(s) by designing strict access control procedures, knowing that something bad was going to happen to a company soon and that we should be ahead of any reactionary solutions imposed upon us. I had a feeling that after some bad press, the e-commerce industry would be pressured to lock down the porous borders that were relatively common at the time.
Just such a case occurred in 2004 when hackers were able to access an estimated 8 million credit card numbers from BJ’s Wholesale Club. It took a few years for details of the incident to emerge, but it was clear even then that there were two primary issues: insecure access points, and poor audit logging. Regardless of whether it was an inside job (as was initially assumed) or an outside hack (which it turned out to be), BJ’s (among other compromised companies) had poor access control and monitoring.
This, as well as other similar incidents, prompted the creation of the Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council, founded in 2006 by American Express, Discover, JCB, MasterCard, and Visa. The payment card industry thus began requiring strict practices and controls around systems that perform above a modest threshold of transactions. It was a strong move, in advance of looming legislation, that helped steer wayward companies toward better practices. Regardless of the critiques of their programs, it has succeeded in shining a light on many problems needing to be addressed.
Fortunately, by the time the PCI guidelines hit the market, we were able to breeze through their audits. The commerce engine we’d built was tighter than what they required. It’s rare that you can so easily point to a situation like this where the extra capital cost on the front end so clearly saved money that would’ve been required to retrofit a running system.
Now, here’s where the history lesson circles around to become informative for current events. We should learn from these cases of identity intrusion and address the core issues. The obvious lesson is not to be cavalier regarding the protection of your email accounts. After all, they are your core identity asset in today’s online world. Be careful when setting up your email account and follow common sense when selecting passwords and associated “remind me” features.
Beyond what you can do for yourself today, the industry needs to step up it’s game, too. Fortunately, there are a number of efforts currently under way to help protect your identity. They just need to be more whole-heartedly embraced and helped to mature by the major players in the market. What’s uniquely interesting about many of the emerging solutions is that they’re user-centric, rather than being centered around any one company’s digital security practices. This focus helps solve the root problems: privacy protection starts at home, and it’s not a simple matter of more/better cyber-security and encryption.
For more information, and to become involved, I highly recommend following the open standards development relating to user-managed identity:
And, of course, the Internet Society Trust & Identity Initiative. Tell them I sent you.