NIST Offers Millions for New Online Identity Management Technology

The National Institute of Standards and Technology, or NIST, is accepting applications for its fourth round of multimillion dollar grants around its program, “National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace (NSTIC),” according to the Federal Times. Those companies or brilliant individuals who want some of that chunk of change have to present solutions on “how to create, authenticate and secure online identities that can be used across sectors and purposes.”

Additionally, the solution(s) cannot rely on passwords, or other “traditional forms” of authentication, and instead seek to create a new standard. There are a whole bunch of other requirements the solution has to meet, such as “enhancing privacy protections and being cost-effective, easy to use, interoperable and voluntary,” and then there are also a list of areas that NIST would like the new solutions to focus on. For this grant round, this is what they want solutions to either solve or incorporate:

• Concerns about the impact on privacy and civil liberties;
• Use of strong authentication technologies;
• Balancing transparency and ease-of-use;
• Building security, privacy and usability into commonly used architectures (i.e., RESTful API architectures);
• Limited deployment of successful trust frameworks — especially addressing multiple sectors;
• Lack of commonly accepted technical standards for interoperability;
• Lack of strong authentication solutions that can be used across multiple sectors and relying parties; and
• Lack of clarity on liability and other complex economic issues.

NIST has awarded five grants a year for the past 3 years, for a total of $30 million. Jeremy Grant, the NIST senior executive advisor for identity management said that “these pilots will ultimately address barriers to the identity ecosystem and seed the marketplace with ‘NSTIC-aligned’ solutions.”

Preliminary applications need to be submitted by March 17 at Grants.gov. You can download that application here. Winners are expected to be announced in September of this year.

Correction: A previous version of this post referred to NIST as the National Institute of Science and Technology, which is incorrect. The correct name is the National Institute of Standards and Technology.