It seems that every day you read on the news about someone being the victim of identity theft or a data breach.  It is affecting everyone from individuals to corporations to law enforcement to government agencies.  There seems to be no end in sight and it appears that there is a very obvious need to improve the methods that are currently being used to combat this every growing epidemic.

To help jumpstart the investments that are needed to make consumers more aware of this problem, better technologies, and better monitoring of consumer accounts the National Institute of Standards and Technology has just offered ten million dollars worth of grants to organizations and commercial companies for research on improved technologies for identity security,  The agency is going to sponsor a competition that supports a pilot project which will feature improved systems that go past the simple use of passwords and users ID.  They want the systems to include trusted, interoperable online credentials.

This competition is going to be handled by the office of the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace (NSTIC).  This office is a White House initiative that will work with public and private sector agencies, advocacy groups, and other groups to help improve the convenience, privacy, and security of transactions done online.  They are figuring that they can fund five to eight projects for as long as two years with each project receiving approximately one point twenty-five to two million dollars per project.  March 7, 2012 is the deadline for submitting the initial proposal.  For any prospective applicants there will be an information meeting on February 15, 2012 but you do not have to attend this meeting to have your project selected.

For the project to be considered it must meet several core principles, which include:

• Privacy-enhancing and voluntary
• Resilient and secure
• Interoperable
• They will be easy to use
• Cost-effective

Some avenues of interest that a project could include according to suggestions from NIST are:

• Create an identity hub that could quickly validate the credentials of the used with a very strong method of authentication that meet standards that have been agreed upon.
• Developing incentives for the consumers that instead of using passwords and user IDs, they would use trusted methods of authentication.
• Come up with a better way to protect consumer privacy but still meet security and business needs.
• Being able to demonstrate their interoperability using various technologies such as passwords used one time, digital certificates, or smart cards.

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