Open Source ID Management Gets IBM Boost

January 29th, 2007: The world of open source identity management scored a boost this week thanks to IBM donating software to the Higgins open source project.

The Higgins project is backed by both IBM and Novell and aims to put the control of personal data back into the hands of the individual and to ease management of security and login information.The software, called Identity Mixer and developed by IBM researchers, enables people such as bank customers to use encrypted information issued by the bank, instead of dropping their private details or their credit card details into plain text when conducting online transactions.

"Today you traditionally give away all of your information to the man in the middle and you don't know what they do with it," Anthony Nadalin, IBM's chief security architect told ZDNet.com. "With Identity Mixer you create a pseudonym that you hand over."

So if a bank customer is making a purchase from an online retailer, the system enables the payment information to be passed directly to the bank rather than being exposed to the retailer, effectively eliminating any chance of credit card details getting hijacked during a purchase.

ZDNet says that the encrypted credentials would be valid for one use only, with each transaction requiring the generation of a new piece of verification information, similar to the number-generating tokens introduced by PayPal and RSA security recently.

Higgins is still under development, however, IBM hopes that with its contribution it will find its way into wide usage.

The first version is expected to be completed by the middle of 2007.

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