In recent years, high-profile data breaches and identity thefts have
grabbed countless headlines. The media coverage suggests it's an
emerging problem, but unfortunately these cybercrimes and their
frequency are nothing new. Instead, what's changed are the new laws,
such as California law SB 1386, requiring organizations to notify
individuals when unencrypted personal information has been—or at least
is reasonably believed to have been—acquired by an unauthorized entity.

The [US] Federal Emergency Management Agency wants innovative pricing options for software that would control access and identity management of the agency's computer systems to deal with surges in use. FEMA published a Request for Information on Jan. 23 seeking to identify existing commercial-off-the-shelf or government-based solutions that would meet its needs. Responses are due by Feb. 6.

NLnet, a philanthropic (private) not-for-profit organisation, has picked Identity, privacy & presence and Open Document Format as the two main areas it will focus its funding on in the next year and beyond. With these two themes the foundation wants to actively pursue the further enhancement of online privacy and standardisation in open document formats.

Members of the OASIS Biometric Identity Assurance Services (BIAS) Integration Technical Committee are seeking review and comment on the current draft of the Biometric Identity Assurance Services (BIAS) SOAP Profile, Version 1.0 specification. BIAS is intended to provide a method to remotely invoke biometric operations and access biometric resources over a SOAP-based Web Services framework. This SOAP profile is a companion document to the INCITS 442 BIAS standard which defines the base BIAS operations and associated data elements.  The 45-day public review ends March 07, 2009.

According to a new report by Forrester, current use of WS-Security doubled over the past two years: Now 30% of enterprises pursuing service-oriented architecture (SOA) use WS-Security as part of their SOA and Web services security strategy. Forrester believes that this gives WS-Security critical mass to sustain its place in the SOA landscape, especially considering that another 16% plan to adopt WS-Security. This also provides a foundation for adoption of other SOAP-based Web services security specifications.