March Workshop to Support Trusted IDs in Cyberspace

The National Strategy for a Trusted Identities in Cyberspace (NSTIC) National Program Office will host the 2012 NIST/NSTIC IDtrust Workshop “Technologies and Standards Enabling the Identity Ecosystem”on March 13 and 14, 2012, in Gaithersburg, Md.

Managed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), NSTIC 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 sensitive online transactions. The strategy envision a set of interoperable technology standards and policies—an "Identity Ecosystem"—where individuals, organizations and underlying infrastructure—such as routers and servers—can be authoritatively authenticated.

The workshop will focus on how technologies and standards can help the framework of the Identity Ecosystem coalesce. As envisioned by the NSTIC, the Identity Ecosystem is a user-centric online environment—a set of technologies, policies and agreed upon standards—that securely supports transactions ranging from anonymous to fully authenticated and from low to high value.

The two-day workshop will feature plenary presentations and panel discussions by leading identity management and standards experts addressing a broad swath of technology and standards issues important to identifying and implementing the four NSTIC Guiding Principles in the Identity Ecosystem, that chosen standards and policies should be:

  • privacy-enhancing and voluntary,
  • secure and resilient,
  • interoperable, and
  • cost-effective and easy-to-use.


The workshop topics will include privacy management, trust models, usability, viable business models for an identity ecosystem, attributes and the results of the Internet Society’s mapping exercise, “The Global Identity Ecosystem.” The workshop also will feature a report on a December 2011 meeting at NIST on “Privacy-Enhancing Cryptography: Working with encrypted data without decrypting."

For more information on the workshop, go to www.nist.gov/itl/csd/ct/nstic_idtrust-2012.cfm.