Grant: Engage Grants Program

In today's world, many people are using the Internet as a medium to communicate with government agencies, friends, and families, to browse for information, or to transact with any of the numerous commercial or financial online services. In Canada, according to a 2009 report by the eMarketer, the number of Internet users is expected to reach 25.3 million, or nearly 73% of the entire nation by 2012. Some of the online services, especially financial and government services require their users to remotely identify and prove their identities in a reliable way. To prove their identities, users will be required to divulge some secret and/or personal information to receive services, which coupled with the fact that most online users have multiple digital identities, could subject them to a larger number of cybercrime attacks, such as phishing, pharming, man-in-the-middle attacks, and medical and financial identity theft. The objective of this proposal is to help aTrust, an Ottawa-based federated identity service provider, study the feasibility of using the Security Assertion Mark-up Language (SAML2.0) standard, in combination with biometric-based identity cards to implement a Single-Sign-On service. Such a service will allow online government agencies and/or commercial and financial companies to exchange user authentication and authorization data. Implementing a Single-Sign-On has a number of benefits including reduction in the number of password required to remember, increased identity protection, improved productivity, and centralized user access control with improved reporting and monitoring for regulatory compliance.