Identity management, authorization and authentication platform (Katso)

Katso system is an identity management, authorization and authentication platform for organizations. Katso system is maintained by government organizations, currently National Board of Taxes and the Social Insurance Institution of Finland. Katso is the first implementation of a large outsourced identity management solution, which is built on the Ubilogin IDM Framework. Katso provides the platform and tools to outsource the identity management of organizations and representatives of organizations to an independent service. It is completely role based and can therefore help government eServices to implement true RBAC services. Government organizations are offering on-line services to organizations and citizens and require strong authentication of users to some of the services, where others require organization level authentication, i.e. a person who is accessing the services are authenticated and authorized as a representative of an organization. Katso and the associated authentication infrastructure implement international standards in authentication and attribute distribution. Katso and the Ubilogin Authentication Server implement Oasis SAML 2.0 and Liberty ID-WSF 2.0 standards in user authentication and attribute queries. The Katso system has an enormous user base, as all of the Finnish companies need to have a Katso ID in order to conduct business online with the Finnish board of taxes. This makes Katso one of the largest deployments of outsourced identity management, authentication and attribute distribution solutions in the world. In the months and years to come Katso will be the de-facto identity management solution for all Finnish organizations. This document describes the development process of the Katso system, deployment and use cases of the system. In this document appropriate observations are made on general issues involving identity management in an outsourced system, not applying specifically to Katso system.

Main results, benefits and impacts

Please see the attached use case document

Return on investment

Return on investment: Not applicable / Not available

Lessons learnt

Please see the attached use case document Scope: National