A Certifiable Federated Identity System for Cross-Agency Collaboration

The Department of Homeland Security's charter has a fundamental requirement to collaborate with other government agencies. Secure collaboration on this scale requires strong identity management which can "vouch for" DHS personnel working with other agencies, and makes it possible to provide DHS resources to individuals in other agencies whose work requires it. We propose the development of a reusable identity metasystem which will be designed foundationally to support government certification for deployment across agency boundaries, focusing on open standards, secure development, and a cross-domain design. Anticipated Benefits: The opportunity to deploy standard trusted components in a variety of agencies, each of which can continue to maintain their own method of managing identity and authorization. Agencies can share information based on this layer, which will evolve to support a wide variety of needs. Potential commercial applications: Compliance with government standards of trustworthiness in software used for critical purposes, along with a user-centric approach to identity management can enable Internet users to merge their many usernames and passwords, can allow critical transactions to be executed with a higher degree of trust, and can help bring about an environment where e-voting increases voters' trust in the validity of the outcome of elections.