Common law governments worldwide have begun to make bold commitments to adopt federated models for identity registration and credential authentication for central government services. This approach requires close collaboration and dialogue with industry to create the needed schemes or trust frameworks that will organize the business, legal, and technical standards, policies and best practices needed to proceed.
As these countries define, design, and deploy their identity federations it’s important that this development does not become siloed by jurisdiction. Rather, for the successful operation of any market there needs to be trusted information sharing. Listings—like the yellow pages—leverage data. Directories—like the DNS—speed introductions. Exchanges—like the NASDAQ—grow markets. Even wedding registries are an example of this, as registries simplify transactions.
Today, there are no such forums for sharing trusted identity data. OIX is building one. Under the direction of the OIX Board of Directors, OIX is building OIXnet, an authoritative registry for online identity trust and a neutral exchange for sharing trusted identity data to enable global interoperability among identity federations in the commercial, non-profit, and public sectors.
Trust framework development is mired in several fundamental misconceptions that prevent us from being successful. One crucial problem is that the model we are using as the fundamental scaffolding for trust frameworks is wrong. A second problem is that we have never properly defined terms, precluding our ability to ever achieve general agreement.
With regard to the model problem, work on broad, general-purpose trust frameworks has started with the assumption that identity is at the heart of trust frameworks. This has made trust-framework development more complicated just as plotting the orbits of the planets is much more complicated if we maintain a geo-centric focus.
As for the definition problem, almost any lengthy discussion of trust frameworks eventually circles back to some of the same debate topics that we have been having for years. While we are very busy creating solutions, we still haven’t defined our terms or our targets. Without these definitions, how will we aim the ship? And how will we know when we get there?