IBM/Novell unveil rival to Microsoft Infocard

IBM and Novell have kicked off an open source project to create an alternative to Microsoft's proprietary Infocard online authentication system.

Project Higgins will put users in control of their information rather than it residing within the data centres of corporations.

This allows individuals quickly to update information such as a change of address, and limit access to confidential information including medical files.

Higgins will split an identity file into small pieces containing data such as email, phone number, address and credit card number. This allows the user, or a trusted application, to determine which organisations get access to a specific piece of information.

Enterprises can access the information using special Higgins open source tools, or build support into existing applications.

"The internet has changed the way consumers think about privacy, and Higgins will help change the way people manage their personal identity information," Dale Olds, a distinguished engineer at Novell, said in a statement.

"Ultimately this approach will give consumers greater control, and businesses powerful new ways to interact with customers."

Initiatives such as Higgins are referred to as identity meta systems. They allow developers to create applications that use digital identities without requiring them to know about the underlying technology, letting them deal with multiple ID technologies at the same time.

The key to a federated identity system is that it allows applications to rely on claims by a trusted agent rather than credentials (the actual password).

The system works in a similar way to a doorman at a nightclub verifying the age of guests by looking at their driving licences, allowing bar staff to trust that all people inside are of the legal drinking age.

Jamie Lewis, chief executive at analyst firm Burton Group, suggested that the open source community needs an identity meta system. 

"Microsoft is going to build its own commercial implementation of an identity system regardless of what the market does. To have an alternative open source framework is an important and necessary piece of the puzzle," he told vnunet.com.

Project Higgins has much in common with Microsoft's forthcoming Infocard identity management technology which provides users with several digital identity cards, each holding only the required information.

Microsoft chairman Bill Gates confirmed at the RSA Conference in San José earlier this month that Infocard will be supported by Internet Explorer 7 which is slated for release later this year.

Infocard will also be made available to Windows Vista and Windows XP users. But where Infocard will be available only to Windows users, project Higgins will provide its software to all platforms including Mac OS X, Linux and Windows.

The concept for project Higgins was developed at Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet & Society. The project will be managed by the Eclipse foundation.

IBM and Novell have committed developer time to the project, as has Parity Communications, a start-up developing software for applications in e-commerce, social networking and identity management. 

The name Higgins is derived from the Tasmanian long-tailed Higgins mouse, in a reference to a concept known as The Long Tail.

The term describes the phenomenon that, in the age of blogs and online ventures, users create chains of information by linking to each other's websites.

These 'long tails' can amount to an underground marketing mechanism that can be used to promote endeavours such as books and movies.

• Project Higgins home page