Higgins Project: Seeking identity management without Microsoft restrictions

Digital identity and digital identity management are key aspects of security for both home and corporate users. The capacity to validate identity and the ability to securely perform transactions online form the basis of consumer and business-to-business interactions. Without a valid digital identity and a mechanism to securely store, manage and transmit that identity, there can be no trust between transacting entities.

Unfortunately there is no single standard for defining and managing identity. There have been numerous attempts to develop a standard and a centralized infrastructure for digital identity management. These have included Microsoft's Passport, OpenID, Liberty Alliance and the now-lapsed open source project IDsec. None of these attempts, however, have yet resulted in a consolidated identity infrastructure. In particular, issues of cross-platform support and integration between Windows, Linux/Unix and other platforms have limited the viability of many of these attempts.

Now joining these projects are two new initiatives, one proprietary and the other open source. The proprietary project, Microsoft's CardSpace (previously code-named InfoCard), has developed a new standard identity management infrastructure, a self-described "identity metasystem". CardSpace provides a single repository for identity, authentication and payment information. It has a mechanism for allowing a user to select appropriate credentials to perform an online transaction or log into a website. CardSpace is shipped as part of Microsoft Vista and available as an add-on for Windows XP.

But CardSpace is a Windows-focused initiative and does not address the requirements of Linux, Unix and OS X users. In a complementary initiative, a team of developers supported by IBM and Novell have begun to develop an open source identity management platform called the Higgins Project, named for a long-tailed Tasmanian jumping mouse. Higgins is more a software framework than an applicati