I came to know about CardSpace when I read an article “Microsoft plan to combat online fraud” in the local newspaper yesterday. CardSpace is a new initiative from Microsoft that is an identity metasystem that provides a consistent way to work with multiple digital identities, regardless of the kinds of security tokens they use. What does this mean? You have several digital identities when you are on the net.  There will be sites where you are identification is validated through a credit card, and there will be sites which identifies you with just a user name and password and think about some sites like the banking application which does something beyond user name and password (say you have to enter randomly picked up digits from your ATM card) to validate your identity and so on.  We need these different identities depending on the situation but to bring them together that can manage these identities we need a system.  That’s what a CardSpace does.  Think of it this way, suppose if we pasted your driving license, passport, your office identity card, credit card etc as one single card and wherever you present it, there was one system that can pick up the appropriate one to be used then we are talking about how CardSpace works.  Here is an excerpt from an MSDN article on what CardSpace provides.

• Support for any digital identity system
• Consistent user control of digital identity
• Replacement of password-based Web login
• Improved user confidence in the identity of remote applications

The concept is similar to Federated Identity Management using open standards like Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) but with CardSpace a lot of the intricacies are managed by Microsoft. But as pointed out in this article “You Are Now Entering CardSpace” the biggest challenge for Microsoft would be to get the buy in from site developers and important organizations like the financial institutions. To know more about CardSpace you can look at the several links including a video presentation in MSDN.