DNS - Kantara Initiative and Open Identity Exchange Team Up To Promote DNS Internet Security

Kantara Initiative and OIX, the identification and security services industry's two leading organizations have teamed up to build up a trust framework infrastructure.

Kantara Initiative, as a global, open, public-private, technology-agnostic forum strives to promote technical interoperability and harmonization; to develop policy frameworks for operational interoperability and; to provide certification and assessment programs to grow trust in the standards, products, and service deployments.

The Open Identity Exchange (OIX) is a neutral, technology agnostic, nonprofit provider of certification trust frameworks for online identity. Founded by grants from the OpenID and Information Card Foundations, it is supported by the companies including Google, PayPal, AT&T, Equifax, VeriSign (News - Alert), Verizon, and CA technologies. Its certification credentials can be used across multiple sites, jurisdictions and networks.

Open Identity Exchange (OIX) and Kantara Initiative have come together to start a collaboration for developing a digital trust framework to build and promote adoption of a robust online trust ecosystem. Digital trust frameworks enable trust in transactions such as logins, registrations, and online eCommerce by allowing digital identity credentials produced by one site to be accepted at other sites.

Under the agreement, these two high profile organizations are going to accomplish the following high-level goals for collaboration:

1. Develop a joint approach to federation services and trust framework certification that takes advantage of the complementary features of the Kantara Initiative Identity Assurance Framework (IAF) and the OIX Trust Framework Platform.

2. Develop technology and policy best practice guidelines in response to growing needs for trust frameworks spanning all types of networks, transactions and jurisdictions around the globe.

3. Identify additional trust framework infrastructure, operations, and testing areas of synergy.

Also according to the agreement, the two organizations are going to jointly submit their own certification assessment results into an operational database which would be hosted by OIX to provide a consolidated view of certification status. An early version of the operational database instance will be a part of the Burton Catalyst Open Identity for Business demo event in July 2010.

As a part of the agreement, Kantara Initiative will begin offering their IAF Profiles as trust framework options within the OIX Trust Framework Platform which will allow OIX member companies to obtain certification against IAF Profiles and have these certifications included directly in the OIX Certification Listing Service.

“Kantara Initiative's collaboration with OIX represents a significant advancement in identity management that will serve to promote security and trust to various digital identity stakeholders (Identity Service Providers, Credential Service Providers, Relying Parties and End-Users, Federation Operators) across multiple technology platforms,” Matthew Gardiner, Kantara Initiative president and director, CA (News - Alert) Technologies Security customer solutions unit, said.

“The collaboration between Kantara Initiative and OIX marks a significant milestone on the ongoing work to ensure the highest levels of trust across all assurance levels for today's online transactions,” Andrew Nash, senior director of identity services at PayPal (News - Alert), said.