Microsoft: internet needs smarter identity

Posted by Ken Y-N on April 10th, 2008 at 03:17pm

At the RSA Conference 2008 in San Francisco Microsoft’s top security strategists talked about security on the internet today and in the future. Microsoft admitted they cannot solve all the problems on their own, and called for wider support from IT and Internet communities to help expediate their efforts.

The only way to restore trust in the online world is to get industry to work together to solve problems regarding authentication and identity protection on the internet. Trustworth Computing has addressed security on the client, but Scott Charney, corporate vice president of Trustworthy Computing at Microsoft says that these issues of identity and authentication need to be readdressed in other to restore faith in the internet.

Microsoft have authored a 20 page white paper outlining what needs to be worked on regarding online security and trust; and Craig Mundie, chief research and strategy officer at Microsoft, described Microsoft’s vision in a keynote speech at the RSA Conference. He said:

“For a long time, the industry didn’t do security well, and because of its market share, Microsoft became a very important player in all of this. We think that we’ve done a good job of improving things over the last six years, but still it’s not enough, and we need industry cooperation to do more in the Internet space.”

This new ecosystem needs to build up the same sort of consensus that initiatives such as the Trusted Computing Group’s Trusted Platform Module have achieved.

Fuller reporting on the situation is available at InfoWorld.

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