Edentity

In summer 2003 Edentity collaborated with the Newcastle office of Pricewaterhouse-Coopers to win a consultancy mandate from the North-East Regional Smart Card Consortium (NERSC), then a grouping of all local authorities in the north-east of England.

In the first phase of the mandate, we worked with NERSC to validate a design for what was called a Trusted Service Network (TSN), essentially an element of IT infrastructure that would permit the introduction of multi-organisation smart cards.

Under the TSN approach, organisations can act either as 'brand owners' and issue cards in their own names, or as 'application owners' who, instead of issuing cards, will seek to have their application hosted on cards issued by brand owners. The TSN may also offer a number of additional services to client organisations, such as 'anonymous transaction and settlement' and 'permissioned data sharing' - using a PIB-style point of presence.

In subsequent phases of the study, we determined market reaction to the TSN concept, and then looked at the quality of fit between the likely deliverables from a TSN project and various aspects of regional strategy.

Since the completion of the project, NERSC has effectively disbanded, and the work on smart cards and identity management in the North-East is being carried forward by the City of Sunderland. The council there is now issuing smart cards that carry digital certificates, and can be used as tokens for Liberty enabled single-sign-on, with the council itself, the University of Sunderland, and the City of Sunderland College all signed up as potential service providers.

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