The government’s push toward E-Authentication and
federated identity management has given a boost to the Security
Assertion Markup Language, industry analysts say.
Federal program managers say the government’s
pioneering interoperability testing program for the E-Authentication
Federated Identity and Authentication Initiative has helped drive
standard implementations of the protocol in identity management
products.
The E-Authentication program, established in 2002,
was using SAML 1.0 as the protocol for user authentication when it
first went live in 2005. In September the program adopted SAML 2.0, and
the General Services Administration announced it was turning
interoperability testing over to the Liberty Alliance Project.
That project, a coalition of 160 industry,
nonprofit and government organizations including GSA and the Defense
Department, sponsors standards development for federated identity
management.
E-Authentication Solutions forms part of the
administration’s e-government initiative. “The purpose is to provide
credentialing services for outward-facing government applications on
the Web,” said Tom Kireilis, GSA’s acting program executive.
The E-Authentication program provides Assurance
Level 1 and 2 credentials, which can be a user ID and password. Program
leaders seek to build a system that would allow users to sign on across
many applications using a single set of credentials.
In addition to the domestic program, several other
national governments are deploying SAML 2.0-based applications to
enable identity- based access. Use of a common standard could allow
federated identity access controls across multiple enterprises.
Federated identity management projects are gaining
momentum because providing user authentication separately for each of
the hundreds of public-facing government applications entails needless
costs for the enterprises supporting them and irksome burdens for users
who now must maintain multiple IDs and passwords to access different
online resources.
Read the complete article by William Jackson in Government Computer News.
