Symantec's Norton Identity Client: An Identity Passport

Internet anonymity is great in some ways, but it doesn't make for good business relationships.

To make it easier for both companies and consumers to confidently and securely interact electronically, Symantec has developed Identity Client. Demonstrated in January at the RSA Conference in San Francisco, Identity Client is slated for first-phase release next month as part of the 2008 Norton product line. It provides a common interface for users to manage the different identities, passwords and protocols they use to access services over the Web.

"A business should be able to identify key attributes about whom they are doing business with online," says Tim Brown, Symantec's senior director of architecture and strategy. "It is also important that a user should be able to know certain things about a business before deciding to engage in a transaction."

"The objective of the Identity Client is to support as many different protocols and authentication methods as possible," he says. "The goal is to make the user's life as simple as possible while providing them protection and tools necessary to safely conduct business online."

The initial product will allow a consumer to create a validated identity. Later enhancements will support features such as one-time credit cards, identity verification, identity validation and identity scoring.

Staffers from Symantec Research Labs, the office of the chief technology officer and the consumer business unit began work on the project in mid-2006. Architects Brian Hernacki and Sourabh Satish worked on shaping the technology, and product manager Gowri Grewal analyzed the market. They were joined later by developers from the Norton Confidential team in the consumer business unit, including Abhay Kulkarni, Goving Salinas and Anne Yeh.

Andrew Jaquith, an analyst at Yankee Group Research Inc. in Boston, says Identity Client was designed to "be the Switzerland" of identity management, working with other identity verification protocols such as Microsoft's CardSpace, the Liberty Alliance Project and OpenID, so users can manage their verified identities from one place.

"Today, we see only a small portion of the potential use of the Internet because of the general, and well-founded, lack of confidence that the Internet can be used securely and safely for consumer-facing applications," says Peter Christy, an analyst at Internet Research Group in Los Altos, California.

"This kind of solution, something that materially improves confidence in using the Internet, will have immediate return for any company with a direct consumer-facing aspect," says Christy. "There are no effective solutions in place today."

Drew Robb