This morning at the RSA conference, Scott Charney announced that Microsoft has licensed the U-Prove technology under the Open Specification Promise and released sample implementations in C# and Java under the BSD license. Implementers will be interested in two specifications: the “U-Prove Cryptographic Specification V1.0”, which documents U-Prove’s cryptographic operations, and “U-Prove Technology Integration into the Identity Metasystem V1.0”, which documents how to use U-Prove tokens with WS-Trust. These specifications are intended to enable interoperable implementations.
The U-Prove technologies enable two key properties: minimal disclosure and unlinkability. For more about U-Prove and today’s Community Technology Preview (CTP) release, see the Microsoft U-Prove site, the post announcing the release, and Vittorio’s post (with links to videos).