OATH, the Initiative for Open AuTHentication, today announced the organization’s 2006 technology roadmap that builds upon the technical framework for open authentication established by the OATH Reference Architecture released earlier this year. OATH is a consortium of leading authentication hardware and software companies, end user organizations and security professionals dedicated to advancing industry-backed standards for open authentication.

“OATH is building on the momentum generated in 2005 through meeting its technology milestones and through membership growth,” said Bob Blakley (pictured), OATH Joint Coordination Committee (JCC) chair and chief scientist (Security and Privacy), IBM. “Our 2006 roadmap is based on the feedback from customers and end-user company members. Our member companies are committed to achieving each of these milestones for advancing the standards for open authentication in 2006.”

OATH says it is well positioned to deliver industry-endorsed standards for royalty-free open authentication technologies to resolve security threats such as identity theft, phishing, internal security breaches and government compliance requiring a stronger level of authentication than static usernames and passwords.

OATH also says it has a proven track record delivering the organization’s original charter including the development of the IETF HMAC OTP specification, adherence to Public Key Cryptography Standards (PKCS#11), and release of the OATH Reference Architecture are all highlights of OATH’s 2005 technology achievements. This record positions OATH as the leading industry organization for open authentication technology solutions.

The 2006 OATH Roadmap outlines specific deliverables that will help realize the goals of device innovation and embedding, interoperability and native application and platform support. Work items currently defined in the OATH Roadmap fall under the following categories:

· Multiple Token, Device, and Client APIs

· Provisioning Protocols

· Web Services Security.