e-Voting and Identity

In my own city, Edmonton, they have been talking up e-voting for a while now.  There was an announcement yesterday that a pilot project is being conducted to validate the process of running an online election.  (More information can be found here and here.)

First of all, I think that this is exactly the type of pilot project that governments must run to be progressive and forward-thinking.  These types of initiatives are high value, not just to validate a solution for this defined need, but for the organization’s other online initiatives.  And the proposed e-voting identification process is an interesting one…

To be frank, I don’t have e-voting very high on my personal list of municipal problems to be solved, BUT I do have a keen interest in how people are identified online.

The City’s new project has an identity proofing process for this pilot project.  It includes a unique method of collecting identity proofing documents that I haven’t seen before: citizens scan (or take a picture of) their real-world identification, then upload it to the City’s website.  Allowed documents include drivers license, passport, Canadian military cards, etc. (see sidebar).

The image of the identification document is then reviewed manually by employees in the elections department and presumably compared to lists of eligible voters. Only when the document matches up with a previously registered voter will a credential be issued to the citizen for voting purposes.

This approach is convenient to citizens, or at least those that are savvy enough to scan a document and upload it to a website (which is probably a pretty high percentage of those that will consider online voting).

But whenever I see ‘convenience’ cited as a reason to do something online, I can’t help but look for the security and privacy compromises required to make that thing convenient.  On first review (I haven’t done a deep dive s feel free to correct me!) here are a few things that might be compromised by such a process:

• How does the process ensure that the citizen is in control of the document at the time e-voting registration takes place?  For example, the passports for a household might be stored in a filing cabinet.  Let’s say one member of the household is politically active and the rest don’t vote at all.  How difficult would it be for the one family member to round up the passports and create multiple e-voting credentials?
• There may be a privacy issue here.  Scanned identification documents contain a payload of sensitive information.  My passport has my legal name and birthdate — two attributes that are useful for the voter vetting process.  But it also contains my passport number, my place of birth and my citizenship.  None of these attributes are needed by this process, and should not be collected and stored as part of the process. (Update: The City’s 311 service has informed me that the data will be stored in Canada and destroyed no later than December 31, 2012. Also, only authorized personnel can view the data and they are subject to confidentiality agreements.)
• Finally, how can one be sure that the scanned identity document has not been digitally tampered with? Paper and plastic documents have physical safeguards to increase reliability.  For example, the Alberta drivers license has a hologram on it and ‘declined width text wave’ feature (and these are just two of a dozen security features).  How do these features translate to the scanned image? Assuming many of these features do not translate well, how well does the scan of the document actually prove the citizen’s identity? As a comparison, would such a scan, subsequently printed, be acceptable as ID at the polling station?

It will be interesting to see how these and other challenges of e-voting will be overcome in the coming months.

Mike

Recent IAM reading…

I didn’t blog or even tweet much over the holidays, but I did manage to catch up on a few good posts and articles while lazing around…

• The Quest to Replace Passwords – Extensive report on challenges with replacing password (HT@aniltj).  The table on page 11 is worth a good study for anyone interested how various password-less authentication options stack up.
• Identity Management on a Shoestring — An excellent report on how to implement IAM in an enterprise without spending years/millions.  Uncanny resemblance to work I’ve been involved with in the past several years, i.e. customized implementations that are not constricted by the cost and complexity of COTS solutions.
• Economic Tussles in Federated Identity Management — Another excellent paper, this time on the economic issues related to Fed ID.  Points out how successful implementations occur when IdPs, SPs and users all receive benefits.
• OASIS Identity in the Cloud Use Cases — A list of 29 use cases that are a solid reference for future IAM projects that involve cloud services.  (HT to @RBsTweets.)
• Gov’t of Canada SecureKey page – A summary of SecureKey and the Canadian federal organization and legislation that supports its implementation.  Would be nice to see a link to the PIA…

These should get your new year off to a good start – happy 2013 everyone!

Mike

Identity, Data, Privacy and Security - Tumbling Together

Reblogged from dataTrending:

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For over a decade, the Federal Government has had numerous efforts and initiatives on identity and access management (IAM). These efforts morphed into identity, credential, and access management (with of course its own acronym, ICAM), underscoring a fundamental principle of having some credential or token (physical or digital) in order to prove and authenticate the identity that an individual is claiming.

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Some thoughts from south of the border...

Italian Football

Reblogged from Code Technology - IAM Consultants and Advisors:

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I spent two weeks in Italy last month and, in case you haven't heard, it is one of the most beautiful places on earth.  So it was appropriate that I attend a match of the 'beautiful game', aka calcio, football, soccer.

The game was Fiorentina (Florence) vs. Sampdoria (Genoa), and it had some importance so a large crowd was expected.  I set out on the number 51 bus from Florence's historic centre, bound for a suburban stadium near the Tuscan hills north of town. 

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From the codetechnology.ca vault: identity and Italian football...

Dispatches from REFEDS and VAMP2012

Reblogged from Digital Innovators:

Good morning from Utrecht, NL where I am attending as CANARIE's CAF representative for REFEDS & VAMP2012

I've found that this September is an inflection point for change; back to school kicks in, summer holidays recharge the batteries and give a chance to step back and take stock. To this end, I'm going to experiment with a  more brief communication model with this blog.  

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Here's a post from Chris Phillips' trip to the REFEDS and VAMP2012 conferences last month.

Canadian Access Federation: A model that works

The largest and arguably most successful identity federation in the world is the network used by higher education institutions.  Academics, faculty and their partners have enjoyed the benefits of single sign-on, secure wireless access and identity sharing since 2003.  Interest has recently spiked in consumer login and citizen identity federation, so it is worth looking at how academia has tackled Federated ID.

There are national identity federations currently operating in over 30 countries, involving thousands of post-secondary institutions.  In the UK Access Management Federation alone there are over 900 members and approximately 250 service providers. In the US, the InCommon federation boasts over 5,000,000 users.

In each of these federations, schools and service providers trust each other via a central body (hub), based on rules that are formally established for participation.

Higher education federations are focused on ‘circles of trust’.  A circle of trust is a collection of organizations that, typically, operate in the same business sphere and have common traits and ambitions.  For example, the Canadian Access Federation (CAF) is made up of over 50 Canadian universities and colleges, plus a growing number of cloud service providers that are involved with student services.  The CAF circle doesn’t include banks, insurance companies or telcos, or for that matter, social media operators.

Higher education federations work because of these well-defined circles of trust.  Participants can release and consume identity information, including a privacy-enhancing, opaque and unique identifier, because the relying parties (schools and cloud service providers) trust the identity providers (schools).  And, most importantly, the users of the federation – the students, faculty, administrators and alumni – are comfortable trusting all the parties in the federation.

The identity information available in the CAF includes name, email address, institution, and ‘scoped affiliation’ (aka role, such as student, faculty, staff, etc.)  This relatively rich claim-set allows a relying party to make access decisions, at least at a course-grained level of authorization.

(Note that some relying parties will still want to have enrolment processes in place to handle access to specific applications or data.  These sites will need to perform additional verification steps to authorize access to services.)

The CAF standard claim-set of identity attributes is based on the eduPerson Object Class.  This specification allows many sites and web applications to provide automatic access without further ‘interrogation’ of the user.  As examples:

• The eduPersonOrgDN claim represents the institution or organization of a researcher.  It can be used by the RP to give a researcher access to a collaboration folder specific to that institution, plus a common collaboration folder that all researchers can use.
• The eduPersonPrincipalName claim can be used by the RP as a key to link a faculty member to a specific record, or to a set of permissions within a web application.  This in turn allows for automated provisioning to take place, with the other identity attributes used to populate the user profile maintained by the RP.
• The eduPersonScopeAffiliation attribute – let’s say it is set to ‘alum’ – can act as a general course-grained entitlement, used to tailor a portal to the specific needs of alumni.  For example, the portal could offer alumni special offers or encourage donations.

It is within this relatively rich framework of trusted identity claims that higher-ed federations have a distinct advantage over social media-based identity networks. Social media identities are fine for low-value transactions (personal blogs, commenting on news articles, etc.), but are nowhere near strong enough for academic and business transactions.  Only within a trusted federation, where the rules of participation are clear and binding, can identity information be appropriately shared.

The CAF and its international counterparts allow for new connections and new services to be established based on trust and collaborative service delivery.  It is a proven model that aspiring identity federations can learn from when planning the next generation of access networks.

Mike

SecureKey — The Interview

Andre Boysen is an Executive Vice President at SecureKey Technologies Inc., the Toronto-based technology company that is working with Canadian governments and business on next-generation identity management solutions.  With the backing of Intel, Telus and Visa (among others) SecureKey looks to make a big splash in the world of secure payments and online identity.

SecureKey Concierge is a credential broker solution that allows government web sites to use banking credentials.  With SecureKey Concierge, government sites can take advantage of existing banking credentials in a secure and privacy-protected way.

I had the chance to interview Andre last week.

Code Technology: Tell us a bit about what SecureKey Technologies is all about.

Andre Boysen: SecureKey is in the business of making online authentication easier, that’s basically what we are trying to do.  We got started helping banks to solve ‘card not present problems’ — this type of fraud went to zero with the introduction of chip cards and PINs.  But it still is an problem on the Internet – anyone finds your credit card number and billing address basically they can start ordering stuff.  It’s hard for the banks to figure out who’s real and who’s not.

We noticed that banks were moving to contact-less chips (based on near-field communications or NFC) in order to speed up things.  With NFC for quick purchases like papers and coffee, the customer just has to tap the card, no need to enter a PIN.

We saw the opportunity to use this technology to do payments on the Internet.  We have built an NFC reader and the concept is that you can have this reader on your computer, at home, and when you want to buy something on the Internet, instead of typing in a card number you just tap your card on the reader and pay that way.

One of our strategies is to get our technology embedded into all consumer electronics.  Intel is a significant investor in SecureKey and all the Ultrabooks coming out actually have our NFC reader built in.  And we are working to get it embedded in cell phones.

Code: So how does this technology lend itself to the direction you have taken with SecureKey Concierge?

Andre: So, yes, that’s a good question… Part of this is that we noticed that we are all drowning in user IDs and passwords.  And the problem for governments is that they know who I am on paper but they don’t know me in person, and when I show up on the Internet they have a hard time knowing it’s me.  The solution in the past is for the government to roll out their own credential — the current incarnation is called Access Key.  But (for higher-value transactions) that includes installing software on my computer and with all the support costs related to this, the government realized that serving me online is much more expensive that serving me in person…

The federal government’s idea was to delegate authentication.  An RFP was issued looking for proposals with 10,000,000 subscribers and at least three credential service providers.  SecureKey, partnering with three of the largest Canadian banks, was the only respondent.

Code: Why are the banks interested in this?

Andre: Their primary motivator is that they want to see identity move online. Banks want customer identities, today largely based on the provincial drivers license, to be verifiable.  With SecureKey’s model four key players will participate: federal government, provincial government, banks and telcos.  These four players have a critical role in the consumer’s life.  The federal government can set standards and leverage its buying power in a way that individual provinces can’t.  The provinces are the source of identity — birth certificates and the licenses we carry around in our wallets.  But the problem is that we don’t deal with the province very often; it’s rare that we have to talk with them and this makes it hard to authenticate online.

This is where the banks come in.  They have a very tight relationship with 98% of Canadians — they see their customers often and know them well.  By participating in SecureKey, the banks will get better digital identities, which will help them when accounts are opened.

To take this further, BC is launching new services card and drivers license with an NFC chip inside.  This is compatible with SecureKey technology and will make it easier to conduct secure transactions related to provincial programs.

What the telcos bring to this is something that Canadians always have in their pockets — their phones.  We are working to get phones and carrier networks working with the system as well.

Code: What is the typical use case SKC is looking to solve?

Andre: Any Canadian who wants quick and convenient access to any federal government service can use their bank account to gain that access.

Code: Can you confirm for us the high-level architecture? Is it primarily an identity broker service that sits between the IdP and relying party?

Andre: No, it is better described as a ‘credential’ broker service because there is no identity information passed. The government never gets the unique MBUN  (meaningless but unique number), only a service-specific number.  There is no information about the user passed to the government other than they are an authenticated bank user.  The government does its own enrolment and identity verification.

Code: Is SecureKey Concierge based on SAML?

Andre: The service is based on SAML 2.o and has support for older versions of SAML and Shibboleth.  OAuth and WS-Trust are planned.

Code: How can the service support an investigation?

Andre: It is important to point out that SKC has a privacy-enhanced design — triple blind.  No one participant has a complete picture of the transaction.

Each bank produces an anonymous MBUN for each customer. The banks will pass the MBUN to SKC during authentication. Our service will log any transactions completed in the session against the MBUN.  To preserve anonymity between services SKC will further anonymize the MBUN for each relying party service and SKC will pass a unique number called the Persistent Anonymous Identifier to each RP.

Event tracking is supported.  So let’s say CRA comes to us and says we have an event here and we need to do an investigation.  Keep in mind that the ‘handle’ we give to the RP is the Persistent Anonymous Identifier (PAI).  CRA can provide us with this number and we can provide the event logs that relate to that PAI.  If this isn’t sufficient, we can use the MBUN to go to the banks and get the details of the authentication event from them. Of course, it depends on how serious the issue is — if it is a judicial enquiry there will be more disclosure, but for other investigations we will keep the ‘privacy veil’ on.

For a compromised account, the bank is going to shut it down and the government won’t see that account again.  It is worth noting that banks have pretty sophisticated systems for detecting problems, so breaches are pretty rare events.

Code: Can you share with us the attributes that are passed between the bank and the government site? From my recent use of the service, I couldn’t tell if the bank asserted my name information.

Andre: Only PAI is passed. Name info is not passed. Note that each service (relying party) does own enrolment and may collect name.

We are all about consumer convenience, choice and privacy control. This service is very user-centric. Users are presented options to approve any information via on-screen prompts.  To facilitate this, SecureKey Concierge will have a set of templates to allow RPs to collect pre-determined ‘bundles’ of information.  The RP will use these templates to collect all the info consistently from a provincial card or bank record.

This broker concept becomes even more important as we move into sharing identity attributes.  We want to make sure we continue to support minimal disclosure.

Code: I’ve worked on citizen identity for a while now, and there is always the challenge of keeping up with their preferences and ‘life-changes’.  How does the SKC service manage changes to the citizen’s banking credentials? Let’s say I decide to switch banks, but want to keep my access to the Service Canada site in place. Is this possible?

Andre: Yes, a bank account change can be made via a the ‘Switch My Sign-In Partner’.  The process requires that you have control of both bank accounts in order to make the switch.

Code: The SecureKey Concierge two-factor solution looks to be a bit of a game changer for high-value and/or high-risk transactions.  Where do you see this technology being adopted in the online government-to-citizen space?

Andre: Enterprise authentication is something we can do. SecureKey is trying to make it easier for employees using their access badges. We see healthcare and government and finance are three verticals we are targeting, all with needs for strong authentication.

Code: How are things going? Has interest in SecureKey Concierge started to pick up? Have you seen interest in the service outside of the federal government, BC and Alberta?

Andre: We launched with the government of Canada in April, and have 15 agencies/departments online today.  Two bigger departments, HRDC and CRA, are set to launch this fall.  We expect that by the end of 2012 we’ll have the bulk of Canadian departments online with SecureKey Concierge.

As for other interest — there is nothing we can share just yet! But ‘wrapping up Canada’ (all remaining provinces) is the current goal.  We also want more credential service providers including partners from outside of the banking sector.

Code: Thanks for your time today Andre.

Andre: You’re welcome!