LSEC - Leaders in Security

ADAPID Workshop on future advanced electronic identity applications

03-Oct-2007

“The Bourne Identity” ?? Microsoft’s Phil Stradling opened today’s ADAPID workshop in Leuven by providing
a flavor of Microsoft’s Cardspace technology.

I’m not yet fully up to speed on the ins and outs of electronic identity cards. Since I started with L-SEC less than a year ago,
I was like most of us Belgians the proud use of this piece of plastic with a golden chip inside. For me the major reason for change at the
time was the size of the thing in comparison with the previous card. At least now it fits my wallet.

The concept of being Matt Damon for a day and losing your identity if you ever used to have a career at the CIA , doesn’t look that exciting to most people.
Stealing one’s identity in real life in the past wasn’t that very likely, if you had a social network that provides you a world around you
at least proving that you are who you are based upon this network you have. However, many succeeded leaving that surrounding and moving abroad and getting a new identity, especially in the Industial Ages and post WWII.
In today’s information society, everything is being digitized, so are our identities, or at least those components that make up our identity such as name, national number, name and place of birth, … Our names and credentials are moving around in a variety of databases around the world, many of those we’re not even aware off. Stealing once’s identity, or at least those credentials looks in that sense as easy as copy pasting text in a word processor.

Since the future of the information ages is moving persons and companies towards controlling and accessing that information based upon
once’s identity; management of that identity is becoming increasingly important for those persons and companies.

The ADAPID project is doing research in the domain of the future use of electronic ID cards. Those cards are becoming ubiquitous in Belgium. Applications
using those cards are still quite scarce today, but development is ongoing and solutions are being prepared. Concepts such as electronic archiving, electronic voting, accessing medical records, … are part of the ADAPID project.

It certainly looks that future of our electronic identities will be preserved on the longer term, by research groups thinking about privacy and anonymity when using electronic identities and by companies such as Microsoft continuously developing platforms that integrate Identity Management with information and applications.

L-SEC will continue to be a partner in this research program. ADAPID continues to be looking for companies and experts wishing to participate in the user group. L-SEC wants to support solutions and applications coming out of those joint ideas.

Some interesting sources of information :
- The 7 Laws of Identity (http://www.identityblog.com) that Identity finally I a set of claims in a security token : - Relying Part, Identity Selector, Identity Provider:
- Microsoft : The Identity Metasystem : Towards a Privacy-Compliant Solution to the Challenges of Digital Identity, Oct 2006
- The ADAPID Project website
- EMIC : European Microsoft Innovation Centre (Research into security and …)

Ulrich Seldeslachts 03-Oct-2007