National Strategy for Trusted
Identities in Cyberspace (NSTIC) is President Obama's initiative to create biometrically verified online identities. This program was launched in April of 2011. Under the banner of creating a secure internet the result will be an end of anonymity on the internet.
This program is now moving forward. The National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) has doled out $7 million to five contractors for developing tools for this program.
5 pilots to take trusted online ID plan to the next stage
Three projects developing online
identity verification schemes in partnership with government programs
are among the five recipients of more than $7 million in grants in
the second round of funding for the National Strategy for Trusted
Identities in Cyberspace (NSTIC).
The projects will leverage credentials
derived from the Defense Department’s Common Access Card for mobile
devices, expand a standard for machine-readable identity policies
with state CIOs, and will work with the Federal Cloud Credential
Exchange to expand use of electronic credentials for military
families.
NSTIC is a presidential initiative to
create an online identity ecosystem with a set of practical,
user-friendly credentials developed by the private sector with
government support. Although the broadest use of the credentials
would be for private-sector transactions, the acceptance of them by
government programs is expected to spur their use, helping to
encourage and secure a burgeoning online economy. A National Program
Office within the National Institute of Standards and Technology
expects to award several grants ranging from $1.25 million to $2
million a year each for up to two years. A first round of grants
totaling more than $9 million was awarded to five programs in 2012.
Although technologies for strong
authentication already are in use, the challenge with the growth of
the Internet has been to make them scale for broad adoption. The user
ID and password combination widely used today rapidly becomes
burdensome both for users and administrators when strong passwords
are required for multiple accounts. Tokens and digital certificates
are expensive when used for single applications and can be complex to
manage when used for multiple applications. NSTIC seeks to develop a
commercial environment to leverage the multiple interoperable
schemes, making them affordable, easy to use and secure for agencies,
businesses and consumers.
The goal of the grants program is not
to develop new technologies but to expand the application and use of
existing programs to achieve broader deployment, focusing on policies
and governance as well as technology.
