Vertical View: Government

The e-Authentication Promise

WHEN PRESIDENT BUSH’S e-Gov Task Force, put together in July 2001, set forth the administration’s electronic government strategy, it presented 24 different initiatives, including e-Travel, e-Payroll and e-Training, all designed to expedite exchanges among citizens and business and the government.

As many of the services and transactions offered by the initiatives involve the transmission of sensitive or private information, trust is crucial for e-Government’s (e-Gov) success. The key to that trust is the deployment of authentication and authorization solutions that ensure the right parties have the right access to the right information. Enter the
e-Authentication Initiative, launched to provide a common authentication service and infrastructure.

Currently,each federal agency involved in the e-Gov initiatives has a different approach for managing identities and providing an authorization mechanism for users of its electronic services. The ultimate goal of e-Authentication is to deliver common interoperable authentication solutions, ensuring an appropriate match for the business needs and acceptable levels of risk of each e-Gov initiative.

The cornerstone of e-Authentication is a gateway that will act as an identity middleman, capturing and verifying the identities of users and then passing those identities along to the appropriate application.

Using Web access management tools, the application owner can create an access control infrastructure that defines and stores access rules. In addition, authentication technology can help create and validate the digital identity for the user in whatever form is appropriate — a user name and password or,when stronger identities are required, a token or a digital certificate — and then pass the identity along to the gateway for verification. Helping all this along is the OASIS Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML), an industry standard that enables secure single sign-on.

RSA Security offers a broad suite of identity management solutions that address the access management and authentication requirements of government and business enterprises.

— Meg Mitchell Moore