What Spurred the Development of the EAP?
The need to authenticate individuals is increasing. A given individual may be authenticated by many organizations playing many roles. For example, one individual might need authentication to, say, access an airline’s web-based tickets and boarding passes; to review account information at a financial institution; to update beneficiaries for an insurance policy; to access an employer’s internal website; etc. But in today’s environment, authentication of a given individual is almost always carried out by each individual organization for the same person. If two organizations wish to trust each other’s authentication processes, they must negotiate a bilateral agreement. As the number of authenticating organizations grows, the number of agreements grows exponentially. To tackle the issues and problems raised by attempts at interoperability, the EAP believes that it is most effective for government agencies, commercial entities and non-government organizations to work together. The EAP grew o
