Single sign-on to services and applications in the cloud

Wave Systems announced the launch of id.wave.com, the beta of an identity service that enables strong authentication and single sign-on to Web services and applications in the cloud.

Wave’s online identity service is designed to allow users to create a single, secure, user-friendly identity that is accepted at many websites including Facebook, Google and salesforce.com using OpenID and SAML. The id.wave.com service takes advantage of the Trusted Platform Module security chip to secure users’ authentication identities with keys held in the TPM.

With an Open ID, a visited website (relying party) communicates with an identity provider and that provider then confirms the visitor’s identity to the website. Many sites participate in OpenID as an identity provider, relying party or both. The id.wave.com service integrates the OpenID standard with the TPM chip on the user’s machine to protect the user’s authentication credentials in hardware. The result is that the PC internally provides multi-factor authentication between the user and service providers – providing secure digital identities across the Web.