SWIFT partners met with members of three other European Projects,  Primelife, TAS3 and PICOS, to discuss cooperation in the area of Privacy and Identity Management.

The event was held in the European Commission's premises in Brussels on the 25th and 26th of February. About 35 people participated in this event including members of the different projects, the related project officers and a group of external experts.

The objectives of this event were to:

• Have a better mutual understanding of the technical challenges of the respective other projects
• Identify the areas of overlap where the projects can join forces or otherwise mutually benefit from each other
• Have a rough roadmap for the further collaboration
• Define concrete steps for collaboration

At the end of its first year, the project completed the integration of specific requirements from the security, network and services point of view, and in developing the initial architecture for SWIFT. A number of specific items have been identified as concrete technology items to work on in the coming 2 years of the project.

Major technical progress has been made in the following:

• Identity Aggregator Architecture: This architecture allows the full distribution of Identity information and functions while keeping a hierarchical control. The distribution includes attribute provisioning, authorization and policy management, authentication and billing.
• Distributed Access Control Framework: For its distributed identity management platform, SWIFT developed a distributed policy management and actuation framework, which includes the distributed processing of policies. Here, a condition may depend on the result of a policy decision taken elsewhere, and generic policies improve usability and control of the user over his/her data.
• Service bound access: This technology allows a user to access a service without the burden of acquiring a network connection. If the user has a subscription with the service, the system will assess the situation and moderate a negotiation between the network provider and the service. The service can pay for the user's network access, perhaps charging the user later.