Bryan Glick

Who are you? And how do I know you are who you say you are? These questions lie at the heart of making the internet a safe, secure part of everyday life, and convincing millions of web-phobics that ebusiness is as trustworthy as the high street.

Identity theft and social techniques such as phishing that prey on online users’ lack of experience have become real threats to the development of the internet, as organised crime gangs industrialise the tools developed before them by teenage hackers.

Old-style security tools are based on the same premise as physical security: the more walls you have around something valuable, the safer it will be.

But there is an increasing realisation that in the virtual world a different approach is needed.

A new open source initiative that received little attention on its launch last month may point the way.

Project Higgins aims to give control over personal information and its security back to the person that matters: its owner. The concept is to develop tools that allow individuals to share their details selectively with web sites on a permission basis. Instead of entering your private data into every site you interact with, you maintain a secure master version, and grant trusted organisations the right to access the elements they need to authorise you.

Higgins aims to overcome the one factor that traditional IT security overlooks – the culture of privacy.

Surmounting knee-jerk fears about use of personal data is one of the things slowing the spread of many well-proven technologies, and for too long the industry has adopted a ‘get over it’ attitude. Project Higgins shows that IT is starting to listen to people outside its cloistered walls.

Microsoft is pursuing a similar concept with its InfoCard system, but Higgins holds extra promise because it sits in the Eclipse community, the producer of arguably the most successful open source software in business IT. The rise of the Eclipse integrated development environment (IDE) has even prompted Borland, one of the market leaders, to put its IDE tools up for sale.

Similar success for Higgins could revolutionise the identity business, and opens up a future of secure, personally managed privacy. This could lead to a new generation of personal tools that automatically identify and authorise our use of online and offline services.

Eclipse Project Higgins

Like this story? Spread the news by clicking below:

 del.icio.us     Digg this     reddit!