Federated Identity, Distributed PKI and Smart Cards

Overview

This paper considers authentication systems based on smart cards, where the smart cards will be issued by many organizations, and authentication must work at any location. An important example of this type of deployment is the US Government planned deployment in support of HSPD (Homeland Security Presidential Directive) 12. Federated Identity schemes have been proposed to support HSPD-12. This paper first looks at systems where federated identity approaches are appropriate. It then considers smart card based deployments, and looks at requirements and solutions to support them. It describes why use of a distributed PKI is generally superior to a federated identity approach.