National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace

Overview[1]#

The National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace (NSTIC, or Strategy) is a White House initiative to work collaboratively with the private sector, advocacy groups, public sector agencies, and other organizations to improve the privacy, security, and convenience of online transactions.

In the current online environment, individuals are asked to maintain dozens of different usernames and passwords, usually one for each website with which they interact. This approach is a burden to individuals, and it encourages behavior—like the reuse of passwords—that makes online fraud and identity theft easier.

At the same time, businesses are faced with ever-increasing costs for managing customer accounts, the consequences of online fraud, and the loss of business that results from individuals’ unwillingness to create yet another account. Moreover, both businesses and governments are unable to offer many services online because they cannot effectively identify the individuals with whom they interact.

The NSTIC Vision[1]#

Individuals and organizations utilize secure, efficient, easy-to-use, and interoperable identity solutions to access online services in a manner that promotes confidence, privacy, choice, and innovation.

The realization of this vision is the user-centric Identity Ecosystem," an online environment where individuals and organizations are able to Trust each other because they follow agreed upon standards to obtain and Authenticate their Digital Identities—and the digital identities of devices.

The Strategy specifies four Guiding Principles to which the Identity Ecosystem must adhere:

The Strategy will only be a success—and the ideal of the Identity Ecosystem will only be fulfilled—if these Guiding Principles are achieved.

Components of the Identity Ecosystem#

The Identity Ecosystem will consist of different online communities that use interoperable technology, processes, and policies. These will be developed over time—but always with a baseline of privacy, interoperability, and security.

The different components include:

The Identity Ecosystem Framework provides a baseline set of standards and policies that apply to all of the participating trust frameworks. This baseline is more permissive at the lowest Level Of Assurance, to ensure that it does not serve as an undue barrier to entry, and more detailed at higher Level Of Assurance, to ensure that requirements are aligned with the risk any given transaction.

The Identity Ecosystem Framework will not be developed overnight. It will take time for different participants to reach agreement on all of the policy and technical standards necessary to fulfill the NSTIC’s vision. Initially, an interim Identity Ecosystem Framework is likely to contain a fairly minimal set of commonly agreed upon standards and policies. The Identity Ecosystem Framework will become more robust over time as participants are able to come to agreement on different standards and policies.

Additional Information[2]#

The White House's National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace was released on April 15, 2011 during a formal event at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The Strategy is housed at the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) within the Department of Commerce, where a new Program Office has been created. The Program Office is currently headed by Jeremy Grant, former co-chair of the Identity Management Committee at TechAmerica.

As an aspirational document, the NSTIC makes many promising statements. Among these is a often repeated promise to "enhance" privacy and security in online transactions. Much like the preceding draft document, the NSTIC emphasizes the role of the private sector as the "primary developer, implementer, owner, and operator of the Identity Ecosystem."

The NSTIC identifies four parties that will contribute to transactions under the Identity Ecosystem:

In addition, the document calls for the incorporation of clear rules and guidelines based on eight Best Practices, which the document defines in an Appendix. Though these practices are to "address not only the circumstances under which a service provider or relying party may share information but also the kinds of information that they may collect and how that information is used," the NSTIC does not mandate the practices to be implemented as they are defined within it:

More Information#

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