Seattle WA – September 27, 2010 – Last month, at the Privacy Identity Innovation 2010 conference in Seattle, Microsoft Senior Program Manager Christian Paquin hosted a session on the U-Prove minimal disclosure technology. ICF Executive Director Drummond Reed interviewed Christian for the following in-depth Q&A about U-Prove.
Q: First, can you tell me what is U-Prove?
A: U-Prove is an innovative privacy-enhancing security technology that can help people protect their identity-related information. U-Prove combines the security of PKI (public key infrastructure) with the flexibility of federation technologies that allow people to link identities across domains. And it does all this while providing privacy-by-design. That makes the U-Prove technology ideally suited to protect claims (attributes) in user-centric identity systems.
Q: Microsoft made a major announcement about U-Prove at RSA in March. What was the essence of that announcement?
A: The initial release of the U-Prove technology we announced at RSA consisted of two parts. First, we released the U-Prove specifications, published under the Open Specification Promise (OSP), so anyone can implement and use them freely and for any purpose. The first specification describes the core cryptographic protocols, and the second is a WS-Trust / OASIS IMI profile (the protocol used for Information Cards). We also released two open-source Software Development Kits (SDK) – one in C#, one in Java – implementing the core cryptographic specification.
