Han Dong, Sr. Product Marketing Manager, User Authentication

Getting noticed is a hard thing. But when you do get recognized by adoring fans, it's like living the life of a beauty queen.

And just look at who noticed us: CrackBerry.com and BlackBerry Cool

So you ask, what's the news?
We all know that VeriSign Identity Protection (VIP) Access for mobile has already been available for free on Blackberry® smartphones and downloadable...

One of key challenges in federated authentication network is the establishment of trust between an identity provider (IDP or OP) and relying party websites (RP). In the real world, contractual agreements provide a simple out-of-band mechanism to effectively bind two parties into a trust relationship. When it comes to federated identity networks, peer to peer contracts between many identity providers and a myriad of relying party websites do not provide for a scalable process. Therefore, open federated networks need a trust assurance framework to bootstrap trust between the three parties (the user, the OP and the RP).

The basic idea is that if an OP can be certified to comply with a set of industry best practices, the RP should be able to enter into open identity exchange where both the websites and the consumers are reasonably protected. Of course, a pragmatic trust assurance framework should be...

It's about time Hollywood produces a blockbuster about identity management.

No, I'm kidding. No producer would never even read a script which includes the term "identity management" in its title (except, perhaps, "Harry Potter and the Identity Management Prince"). But there is a new Bruce Willis movie that deals with the issue of identities, among other things, and, well, that's a start.

The movie is called "Surrogates" (watch trailer), and it tells the story of a futuristic world in which humans live in isolation while only communicating with their fellow man through robots that serve as social surrogates and are better-looking versions of their human counterparts.

Now isn't that kind of what happens today in our own world? When we go to the web we have a virtual identity through which we communicate with our fellow man, fellow banks, fellow stores: we send our virtual identity (user...

In the coming years, many websites will contemplate adding strong authentication to accounts login. So far, early adopters for strong authentication have mostly been financial institutions. Since 2005, banks and brokerage firms have had had little choice than following the FFIEC guidance. This 2005 regulated mandated a move to stronger credentials than just name and passwords. Today, SAAS providers and large consumer Web sites are increasingly suffering brand exposure and public scrutiny following high visibility attacks (here and there). With increasing reliance on the cloud to host mission critical applications and sensitive data for enterprises and consumers, I would expect many large online services to begin offering stronger login options to their user base.

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