“The more identities we manage, the more significant the relationships among them become.”
These were the words of Eve Maler, VP innovation & emerging technology at ForgeRock, speaking at ISSE Conference 2016 in Paris today.
In a session titled ‘Securing a Future Perspective’ Maler discussed the future landscape of identity and the impact it has on the relationships that are forged as a result of interconnection.
“Every person, whose digital identity we’re talking about managing, has a relationship to an organization, or more than one organization, or a lot of organizations,” she said.
“Quite a lot of our identity is actually bound up with the differential aspects of our identity that each different organization knows about us. So what that means is, if there was only one person on the planet, the singular aspects of their identity would make that person special, but in reality every new identity, every new relationship with an organization means the relationships become more and more important in describing what there is to know.”
When you get into the billions and trillions of identities, continued Maler, it starts to get more and more interesting; what’s the relationship with organizations, what’s the relationships with other people.
“For example, you have a subscriber to digital media in a household, what is the relationship of that householder with the other people in the household? What is the relationship of anyone in the household with their individual devices? What are the relationships between the devices?”
You have to bind these types of relationships together, accurately, and often you have to dynamically unbind them, accurately, so now you have a dynamism element to getting it correct, she argued.
Identity and relationship technology have to be seen as equals, she said, but it’s important to remember that nobody practices or uses identity authentication for their health, they do it for an end – usually for security and data protection.
To conclude, Maler suggested the future for the trend of self-sovereign identity technology will fall into the camp of solving identity proofing, “which is going to be valuable not so much for individual people, but for businesses, organizations and governments that value identity verification.”
“Very little is truly self-assertive and much identity information actually has to be third party assertive to be valuable,” she added.