GSA seeks input on ID management in the cloud

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GSA seeks input on ID management in the cloud

The General Services Administration will hold a vendor day Aug. 7 in Washington, D.C. The concept of identity management in the cloud builds on the efforts...

Jason Miller@jmillerWFED

July 30, 2012 5:05 pm

2 min read

The idea of putting identity management in the cloud is getting more traction. The General Services Administration is hosting an industry day Aug. 7 in Washington, D.C., seeking input on how contractors might implement a privacy-enhancing, cloud- based, federated credential-exchange service.

“Over the past few months, the Federal Cloud Credential Exchange (FCCX) Tiger Team has worked on the use cases and the functional requirements necessary for the operation of an identity federation capability that can be integrated with a government agency web application to support and consume a full range of digital credentials such as PIV, PIV-I and other third party credentials issued under a Federal Identity, Credential and Access Management (FICAM)-approved trust framework provider,” wrote GSA’s Deb Gallagher and Naomi Lefkovitz, of the National Institute of Standards and Technology in a blog post Friday. Gallagher and Lefkovitz are the co-chairwomen of the the FCCX Tiger Team.

The White House-sponsored team has been working on the concept of managing identities in the cloud for the last six months. The working group is creating common requirements that all agencies could agree to around federated identity management in the cloud.

This effort aligns closely with the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace (NSTIC) and the work the Information Shared Environment and GSA are doing to improve secure information sharing through a back- end attribute tool.

The industry day is an attempt to take the next step in bringing industry ideas into the mix.

GSA wants input on 13 areas by Aug. 13, including the description of a high level architecture to let agencies use a third-party credential to authenticate users across a shared service in a public or private cloud.

Industry commenters also must tell GSA how they would address cost, privacy and how they would scale the service across multiple agencies.

This story is part of Federal News Radio’s daily Cybersecurity Update. For more cybersecurity news, click here.

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