"Federated Identity technology is now beginning to deliver on its promise of making seamless single sign-on between Web sites a reality," said Daniel Blum, Senior Vice President and Research Director, Directory and Security for industry research firm the Burton Group. "Real world deployments like this one involving Trustgenix and the Department of Labor's E-Authentication initiative demonstrate that federation products are mature enough to support production applications as well as multiple federation standards."
E-Authentication is a centralized network that provides identity management services that simplify and secure how citizens, businesses, and government employees access to government Web applications. The network links government and commercial organizations so they can securely exchange trusted user credentials in a standardized way.
By using IdentityBridge to federate its applications with the E-Authentication Portal, MSHA is saving the time and money required to develop and maintain its own authentication infrastructure. In addition, IdentityBridge eliminates the need for MSHA to field help desk calls for password resets for those users participating in the E-Authentication Federation. MSHA selected IdentityBridge for its ability to receive assertions from CSPs within the E-Authentication Federation. This enables MSHA to receive identity assertions from other agencies and commercial organizations.
The E-Authentication Service is the cornerstone of the E-Government (e-Gov) Act of 2002 which was created to improve Internet-based technology and make it easy for citizens and businesses to interact with the government, save taxpayer dollars, and streamline citizen-to-government communications.
States, in addition to the federal government, are testing the usefulness of e-authentication. Last June, the Illinois Department of Central Management Services and the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency were recognized with the CIO Partnerships Award from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for partnering with the U.S. EPA during a test of the interoperability of e-authentication schemes in 2004.
