Agencies have until Dec. 15, 2004, to classify the authentication needs of all their major systems, using the final guidance the Office of Management and Budget released yesterday.
Federal IT managers also have until Sept. 15, 2005, to categorize all existing transactional systems.
The guidance comes five months after OMB, through the General Services Administration, issued interim regulations (Click for GCN July 10 story) asking agencies to conduct risk assessments and apply one of four assurance levels to all e-government and transaction systems.
“The guidance directs agencies to conduct e-authentication risk assessments on electronic transactions to ensure that there is a consistent approach across government,” said Josh Bolten, OMB director, in a memo to agency executives. “It also provides the public with clearly understood criteria for access to federal government services online.”
One of the major changes in the final policy is that OMB puts the onus on agencies’ business owners—such as program managers—instead of technology managers. The guidance says that business process owners hold the primary responsibility to identify assurance levels and strategies to achieve them.
Stephen Holden, an assistant professor in the Information Systems Department of the University of Maryland Baltimore County, agreed with the change.
“The draft policy from the fall, I felt, undermined OMB’s message that this is about business transformation, because it focused too much on technology,” said Holden, whose research is focused on e-government. “The new version does a much better job of clarifying the role of the business owner. The policy has moved quite a bit from the draft.”
The final guidance requires agencies to go through a five-step process to determine assurance levels:
Conduct a risk assessment
Map identified risks to assurance levels
Select technology based on technical guidance from the National Institute of Standards and Technology
Validate that the system achieves the required assurance level
Reassess the system to determine necessary technology enhancements.
The assurance levels remained primarily the same in the final guidance from the interim one. They start at Level One, where little or no confidence is needed to validate the user’s identity, and increase to Level 4, where a very high confidence of the user’s identity is required.
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