The U.S. Postal Service will be the guinea pig for a White House-led effort to accelerate government adoption of technologies that allow federal agencies to accept third-party identity credentials for online services. The program involves using services from organizations like PayPal and Google through standards like OpenID rather than requiring users to create government user names and passwords.

The government hopes the pilot will serve as the foundation for a wider, federated approach to identity management for government services. Procurement documents characterize the goal as having a single “broker” to validate disparate identity credentials across a wide range of federal agencies. Federal CIO Steve VanRoekel set a requirement in October 2011 that within three years from that date, federal agencies would be able to accept third-party credentials to facilitate access to online government services.

The federated identity effort, known as the Federal Cloud Credential Exchange, is just one piece of a broader Obama administration online identity initiative: the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace (NSTIC), which aims to catalyze private sector-led development of a secure, digital “identity ecosystem” to better protect identities online.
Network Computing