The purpose of this discussion group is to identify and raise awareness of use cases around the deployment and adoption of European models and systems – particularly the trust framework model.

This group will gather input from International stakeholders —specifically, actors from within vertical and jurisdictional communities of trust— with the purpose of allowing participants to share information about successful and challenging experiences with specific focus on the use cases for deploying European and the trust framework models.

The purpose of the Federation Interoperability Work Group is to profile existing specifications to define an interoperable trust infrastructure for use by parties participating in trust frameworks. This will allow entities to determine the certification status and configuration parameters of entities outside of their local federation.

The Healthcare Identity Assurance Work Group will design, implement and test reference applications for secure access to health information. Two use cases are proposed that would be developed and supported as part of the work group. One is for consumers to be able to access their health records with a standardized login system, and secondly, a way for healthcare workers to access secure health information. The goal of this activity is to engage the broadest community participation to facilitate the adoption of the reference implementations and specifications by the healthcare industry, worldwide.

Organizations recognize the need for the unambiguous expression of identity. Identity can represent a physical individual, a collection of individuals, a logical entity, a resource or a capability. Identity is a fundamental element for establishing and maintaining business relationships, and for describing the credentials, capabilities, and responsibilities of parties to a relationship.

The principal business problem that drove the formation of the original Identity Services Working Group (under the auspices of Burton Group) is the difficulty companies face when integrating vendor IdM products with their existing infrastructure and, increasingly, in integrating vendor products themselves. As vendors continue to add to their IdM suites, integration between products is a challenge of increasing concern to organizations.

The Identity Assurance Work Group (IAWG) has been formed within the Kantara Initiative to foster the adoption of trusted on-line identity services. To advance this goal, the IAWG will provide a forum for identifying and resolving obstacles to market and commercial acceptance that have limited broad deployment and adoption of trusted identity services thus far. The first step will be development of a global standard framework and the necessary support programs for assessing identity service providers (IdSPs) against criteria that determine the level of assurance that a relying party (RP) may assume in evaluating identity claims provided by those IdSPs. The framework and processes will be defined in a way that scales, empowers business processes and benefits individual users of identity assurance services.

The framework will be the basis upon which IdSPs, RPs and their services can be certified as compliant with common policies, business rules and baseline commercial terms, avoiding redundant compliance efforts and market confusion about the substance and value of identity assurance delivered.

The ID-WSF Evolution Work Group will work to continue the development of the Liberty Alliance ID-WSF Specification Set – such evolution ultimately manifested as a submission of relevant technical work to an appropriate SSO for standardization. Evolution of the ID-WSF Specification Set may include functionality to address new use cases, additional bindings beyond SOAP, or profiling of other technical specifications to increase harmonization.

The goal of this working group is to identify and document the use cases and scenarios that illustrate the various sub-sets of user driven information, the benefits therein, and to specify the policy and technology enablers that should be put in place to enable this information to flow.

Project VRM and other related parties wish to build a framework around which a new type of personal information can be enabled to flow, and in doing so improve the relationship between demand and supply. The contention is that when individuals are forced to sign organization-centric privacy policies/ terms of use then this places limitations on the information that will be shared. If such constraints were removed, and capabilities built on the side of the individual, then new, rich information will flow – including actual demand data (as opposed to derived/ predicted demand).

The Interoperability Work Group (IOPWG) serves to support the Kantara Initiative interoperability program through the development of test procedures used by the Interoperability Review Board, regardless of protocol. IOPWG will work closely with the Interoperability Review Board (IRB) . The IRB is the Board of Trustees (BoT) sub-committee responsible for member oversight of the interoperability program. In addition, the IOPWG will make resources available to provide expertise and “technical support” to the IRB during the course of any given Kantara Initiative interoperability event for the purpose of assisting the IRB in its resolution of conflicts of protocol interpretation that may arise among test participants.

The Japan Work Group is responsible for:

Promoting the education and adoption of Kantara Initiative deliverables in the Japanese market and government.

Generating best practice guidelines, suggestions and technical recommendations that feed into appropriate Kantara Initiative Work Groups (WGs) to make Kantara Initiative deliverables better suited to thrive in the Japanese market environment.

The ultimate goal of the Liberty Specification Work Group is to maintain the Liberty ID-FF, ID-SIS and IGF specifications such that they are a ubiquitous, interoperable, privacy-respecting Identity Layer for the Internet.

This workgroup is responsible for promoting the functional open source implementations related to digital identity management and the associated paradigms (e.g., privacy and trust). The workgroup will also collect expectations and recommendations around open source, especially from other Kantara workgroups as the eGovernment and Telecommunications Identity Work Groups. Finally, the workgroup will highlight the missing open source implementations the most needed.

Privacy, and the policy decisions which affect it, are increasingly a core theme of digital identity-related work. The Privacy and Public Policy (P3) Work Group is intended to ensure that the Kantara Initiative (“Kantara”) contributes to better privacy outcomes for users, data custodians and other stakeholders, by defining privacy-related principles and good practice applicable to a broad range of prevalent technology platforms.

The ultimate goal of the Telecommunications Identity Work Group (TIWG or TelcoID WG) is to help reconcile fragmented efforts in the telco specifications development area and in the telco marketplace regarding identity management. In order to achieve that, it will act as a forum to facilitate the dialog between Kantara Initiative and the telco industry sector. Additionally, the group will produce telco specific technical material on top of Kantara Initiative specifications as necessary to ensure proper implementation of suitable Kantara Initiative technologies in a telco infrastructure.

Try to establish a universal SSO method in consideration of the existing IdM technology.

Under the Systems and Emerging Technologies Security Research grouping, NIST has established a program on Personal Identity Verification of Federal Employees and Contractors.

Three technical publications have been developed:

NIST Special Publication 800-73, "Interfaces for Personal Identity Verification" specifies the interface and data elements of the PIV card.

NIST Special Publication 800-76, Biometric Data Specification for Personal Identity Verification" specifies the technical acquisition and formatting requirements for biometric data of the PIV system.

NIST Special Publication 800-78, "Cryptographic Algorithms and Key Sizes for Personal Identity Verification" specifies the acceptable cryptographic algorithms and key sizes to be implemented and used for the PIV system.

For the latest versions and revisions of the above NIST publications please see http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/PubsSPs.html.