Microsoft recognized for privacy-enhancing identity management technology

Posted by Brendon Lynch,  Chief Privacy Officer and Senior Director, Trustworthy Computing on the Microsoft on the Issues Blog:

Last night, Microsoft was honored to accept the 2010 HP-IAPP Privacy Innovation Award for Technology.  The award was presented by the International Association of Privacy Professionals (IAPP), the world’s largest association of privacy professionals, during the IAPP Privacy Academy conference in Baltimore, MD, USA.
 
We won the award for U-Prove, a security and privacy-enhancing technology that helps people protect their identity-related information. U-Prove uses tokens that make it possible for people to protect their identities by enabling them to disclose only the minimum amount of information needed for a transaction – sometimes no personal information may be needed at all.
 
We are delighted that our fellow privacy professionals have recognized the innovative nature of the U-Prove technology and Microsoft’s commitment to enable privacy in identity systems.  We have taken an initial step to make the U-Prove technology broadly available to software developers under an open source license.
 
U-Prove has already garnered industry recognition. On May 5, 2010 Microsoft won the in European Identity Award in the "Best Innovation" category for U-Prove.  To demonstrate how minimal disclosure works, Microsoft has partnered on a project with Fraunhofer FOKUS, a research institute that hosts the German government's eID (electronic identification) system, which will begin to roll out electronic identity cards to citizens in 2010 using U-Prove tokens.

U-Prove was invented by Dr. Stefan Brands, acquired by Microsoft in March, 2008 and the specification and software toolkits were released in March, 2010.