Kantara Initiative (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The Treasury Board of the Canadian Government recently published a draft ‘Guideline on Identity Assurance’, sharing the document with the Kantara Initiative and continuing their contributions to this industry organization focused on defining the best practices for the assurance of federated identity.

This builds on their existing policy documents, such as the Standard on Identity and Credential Assurance, and for non-technical folks it would be a very dry read but what it will enable is really quite exciting, most notably the foundation role this technology will play in enabling a next generation Internet and Digital Economy.

Hence the headline role of this field to our Digital Economy Canada program.

Cloud Identity Ecosystem

While the technologies are relatively new, the important part is really how they will enable existing legacy systems to be better interconnected.

Federation is the process of many different systems joining into one, and federated identity the method where this is achieved by linking Identity management systems, those that handle you signing in via your username and password. Having to repeat this process over and over is due to a lack of this integrated capability, and so it can be seen as an advancement in IT systems maturity.

This work mirrors equally pioneering advances by other governments most notably the UK, USA and New Zealand, and on a large scale this will give birth to what the USA program describes as the ‘Identity Ecosystem‘.

As per the examples they provide this is singular environment that results from joining systems so that processes between them are smoother and more efficient. Similarly as the Government of Canada describe:

“Federating identity is a whole-of-government approach that enables departments and agencies to fulfill program and service requirements by relying on identity and credential assurance processes that have been carried out by another department or organization.

The underpinning of the Government of Canada’s approach to federating identity is the principle that there is no single authoritative source of identity information within Canada. Instead there are a number of authoritative sources enabled by federal, provincial and territorial acts and regulations. These authoritative sources are recognized across the different jurisdictions and include vital events, benefits administration taxation, legal status and entitlements, to name a few.”

As we develop the capabilities for recognizing these entities and events online so we will engender a second generation of the Internet. In the same way HTTP and HTML have enabled a standardized, universal content publishing and sharing environment, a ‘content web’, so equivalent standards for Identity and business documents will beget an equally universal “dataweb“.

i-Government

This evolution will have an impact on how Governments conduct their business processes in the same way the first generation e-commerce did for online retailing, what we could think of as ‘i-Government’, referring to Identity-enabled systems.

The Canadian doc describes:

Another key principle is that there is also no single authoritative identity document within Canada. Instead, there are numerous official documents and records that are used as evidence to establish or verify identity (e.g. birth certificates, driver’s licenses, etc.). 

Currently, federal departments are dependent on evidence of identity originating from other jurisdictions, other countries or other federal departments that have similar dependencies. Today, evidence is predominantly in the form of physical documents, such as birth certificates, driver’s licenses or citizenship certificates.

Think of the role these paper documents play in traditional offline procedures – How many times you are required to provide copies of your drivers licence or passport as the means to authenticate yourself to an application of some kind.

And so digitizing these documents and the business processes will form the basis of the Digital Economy. Demonstrating just how much of a visionary Canadian identity expert Dick Hardt was at the time, this effect is described very effectively in his entertaining 2005 OSCON presentation on Identity 2.0.

Helpful use case scenarios are also described in Federating Identity Management in the Government of Canada: A Backgrounder, such as citizens sharing personal from their drivers licence record to populate the enrollment process of another agency.

By sharing identity-based data government agencies will be able to greatly reduce red tape, a key requirement for them all. Fragments of citizen profile information are stored across multiple systems like the drivers licence app through to social welfare et al, with their Identity log-in being the common mechanism that is duplicated across them all.

Uniting these stovepiped systems is the vision of the USA Digital Government strategy, and the UK Government calls these ‘Trusted Transactions’, taking steps such as joining the OIX to implement the required ‘Trust Framework’ protocols, also described in the Canadian document.

The Roadmap Opportunity

Naturally this scale of change and progress presents considerable business development opportunity, and how best to develop ventures to do so is the core purpose of our Roadmap, and where the relevant section is ‘IDaaS” – Identity as a Service.

Indeed the Canadian Government specifically identifies this opportunity:

“At present, no formalized identity federation exists within Canada, but one is anticipated in the near future.”

These are the gaps in the market that form the basis of any good entrepreneurial opportunity. Our IDaaS specification is being developed in partnership with the Kantara Initiative, recognized by the Government of Canada:

“Presently, there are several trust frameworks available and provided by industry. These include frameworks from the Kantara Initiative and the Open Identity Exchange (OIX). It is anticipated the Government of Canada will adopt one or several trust frameworks. The adoption process for the Government of Canada is currently being developed.”

They also specifically name the IDaaS approach they envisage using these best practices:

“Commercial Broker Service (CBS): A commercial service provided by contract to the Government of Canada that enables clients to use external credentials they already have other organizations (e.g. financial institutions) to securely authenticate in order to access government services.”

With Canadian startups like SecureKey netting $30m VC funding on the back of winning the first of these types of deals, it is clearly a high-growth sector that can attract considerable sums of new funding, and our Roadmap program will help other startups repeat this success.