Michael Beach is the Chief Security Designer for The Boeing Company.  His primary responsibility is to drive Boeing security strategies to design.  In recent years areas of interest include authentication and authorization systems, with focus on single sign-on, cross-company federation, and access provisioning efforts.  Michael has been with Boeing for 20+ years providing information management and systems development expertise. He has been chief engineer/architect for several major system development projects, and was selected as a Boeing Associate Technical Fellow in 1995.  He has been the Boeing representative to the OASIS Security Services Technical Committee and participated in the formulation of SAML 2.0.  Michael is currently the Boeing representative to the Microsoft Identity Management Customer Advisory Council.

Michael holds a Batchelor of Science Mechanical Engineering degree from California State Polytechnic University and is a Certified Information Systems Security Professional.  He was recipient of a 2004 Digital ID World industry award for pioneering federated identity.

Presentation
State of the Federation

The Boeing Company deployed its first proprietary cross-company federation in 2001 and the first production Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) implementation in 2003. Anticipation at that time was standards-based federation would catch on and within a few years we would see widespread adoption. It is now 4 years later – interest in federation is still lively, but adoption is far from widespread, and production implementations are still mostly limited to single sing-on functionality. There are a plethora of standards and newcomers, legal implications are unclear, deployments are hard, and large scale manageability is unknown. We will discuss the “State of the Federation” including today’s challenges, future considerations, possible game-changers, and a general situation assessment.

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