The NSTIC pilots family is growing today with the announcement of three new pilot projects receiving NIST grants!
These projects will join the ranks of the 15 active
NSTIC pilots and alumni that know all about catalyzing a marketplace of identity solutions. The NSTIC pilots family has done a great deal to seed the market, including:
- Bringing together over 130 partner organizations in support of advancing the NSTIC across 10 major industry sectors;
- Impacting approximately 2.3 million individuals;
- Enabling 10 MFA solutions such as SMS text and multi-modal biometrics; and
- Establishing or enhancing five commercial trust frameworks to facilitate interoperability of NSTIC-aligned credentials across sectors.
With a new round of NIST grant awardees, we have yet another opportunity to bring NSTIC-aligned solutions to the masses. This year’s additions are developing and deploying awesome, innovative solutions to address the toughest identity conundrums associated with everyday transactions; the pilots are aimed specifically at reducing tax refund theft, improving the security of medical information, and providing secure online storage for internet-of-things enabled devices.
This year’s selections show how we’re transitioning our pilots program to focus on filling more specific, critical gaps in the marketplace. In one of the
federal funding opportunities (FFOs) we released earlier this year, we solicited projects with a focus on privacy-enhancing technologies since we’ve found privacy to be one of the most challenging NSTIC Guiding Principles for organizations to address. This more specific FFO followed a
general solicitation for NSTIC-aligned solutions, which mirrored NSTIC FFOs of years past.
From submissions to these two FFOs, we at the NSTIC National Program Office selected three new pilot projects to push the boundary of identity management as it currently stands.
Without further ado, the grantees announced today are:
MorphoTrust USA (Billerica, Mass.: $1,005,168) MorphoTrust’s second NSTIC pilot grant will focus on preventing the theft of personal state tax refunds. Through MorphoTrust’s partnerships with multiple states, the project will show how to efficiently leverage trust created during the online driver licensing process (which includes enrollment, verification through biometric identification, authentication and validation, and issuance) in a scalable way to create trustworthy electronic IDs that individuals control.
HealthIDx (Alexandria, Va.: $813,922) HealthIDx proposes to deliver an innovative, privacy-enhancing technology that protects patients’ identity and information. This project will pilot a ‘triple blind’ technology in which medical service providers have no knowledge of which credential service provider an end-user chooses, credential service providers have no knowledge of which medical service provider the end-user is visiting, and the identity broker has no knowledge (nor retains any information) about the transaction’s parties or contents.
Galois, Inc. (Portland, Ore.: $ 1,856,778) Galois will build a tool to allow users to store and share personal information online. The user-centric personal data storage system relies on biometric-based authentication and will be built securely from the ground up. As part of the pilot, Galois will work with partners to develop just-in-time transit ticketing on smart phones and to integrate the secure system into an internet of things-enabled smart home.
NSTIC pilots aren’t just about executing on the descriptions above. These last few years, they have been vital in offering a commercial perspective on the Identity Ecosystem Framework to the
Identity Ecosystem Steering Group, piloting the newly drafted
Privacy Risk Management Framework for the privacy engineering team at NIST, and providing feedback for NIST publications, such as
NISTIR 8054. We look forward to seeing these three 2015 pilots follow suit and advance the NSTIC. And with these three pilots addressing identity challenges in everyday transactions, we can’t wait to see entirely new groups of individuals benefit from the security, privacy, and convenience of NSTIC-aligned solutions.
We at the NSTIC NPO will be sure to keep you updated as these pilot projects unfold, so be sure to check our
blog and
twitter regularly for updates.
MorphoTrust, HealthIDx, and Galois: welcome to the family!
