Wednesday, 14 March 2007

ITU's Online Identity Work Aims to Solve Key Security Issues

The use of multiple usernames and passwords represents a boon for hacking, identity theft and other forms of cyber crime and is causing substantial financial loss amounting to billions of US dollars. An International Telecommunication Union (ITU) Initiative on Identity Management (IDM) that will address this problem is poised to offer a technology- and platform-independent solution.

The world's key players in IDM have now taken the first steps towards a globally harmonised approach to IDM. Developers, software vendors, standards forums, manufacturers, telcos, solutions providers and academia from around the world have come together in an ITU Focus Group on Identity Management to share their knowledge and coordinate their IDM efforts. The aim is to bring interoperability among solutions by providing an open mechanism that will allow different IDM solutions to communicate even as each IDM solution continues to evolve. Such a "trust-metric" system has not existed until now. Experts also concur that interoperability between existing IDM solutions will provide significant benefits such as increased trust by users of on-line services as well as cyber security, reduction of SPAM and seamless "nomadic" roaming between services worldwide, the company added.

Abbie Barbir, chairman of the Focus Group on Identity Management and Nortel standards adviser, said, "Our main focus is on how to achieve the common goals of the telecommunication and IDM communities. Nobody can go it alone in this space; an IDM system must have global acceptance. There is now a common understanding that we can achieve this goal."