As the Internet plays an increasingly vital role in day-to-day consumer and business activities, concerns about online identity theft, fraud and privacy continue to escalate. Various organizations, businesses and federal regulators are calling for measures that help prevent the exploitation of personal information, such as passwords and credit card numbers. Many industry observers today worry that traditional authentication methods based on account names and passwords have grown inadequate for online activities, since they can be misused to extort personal information through “phishing” schemes. Current authentication methods also require consumers to maintain an ever-lengthening list of passwords, which can encourage insecure practices such as reusing account names and passwords across multiple Web sites.

The need for advanced online identity protection has prompted the industry to rethink the way digital identity is managed online. It also served as a catalyst for developing a new identity architecture known as the “identity metasystem,” which is designed to capitalize on and interoperate with various identity systems. Within the next year, Microsoft plans to release a set of technologies built on the identity metasystem, including “InfoCard,” the code name for a technology designed to simplify and improve the safety of accessing resources and sharing personal information on the Internet; and a new version of the Active Directory directory service, which will include an identity provider that integrates with the identity metasystem.

PressPass sat down with Richard Turner, product manager for “InfoCard” at Microsoft, to learn more about the technology’s potential impact on identity security and why browser support for “InfoCard” is key to addressing the problem of online fraud.