With the development of Internet Economy the importance of representing the citizen’s identity has been raised increasingly.

Nowadays, lots of websites providing different kinds of online services as well as even governmental agencies providing core services on the Internet are in need of very strong and user friendly authentication systems. This should mainly help in decreasing the Internet fraud and increasing user confidence and probably even e-citizens’ participation in eGovernance processes. This very important issue has its own history and evolution, which brought the author of this paper to conducting empirical research in this field.
Authentication is the act of establishing or confirming something (or someone) as authentic, that is that claims made by or about the thing are true (Wikipedia, 2006). Authenticating a person may mean to identify that the person is who he/she says he/she is. In case of organizations they can present their Trust Certificate, but in case of a person - it is just impossible without special technologies. However, in many cases the authentication is the most important stage of Internet Interaction. For a long time authentication procedures in the area of service provision were, of course, paper-based (even now some companies request scanned copy of passport by email). And, probably, the best examples of self identification were passport or driving licence. Meanwhile with the arrival of digital technologies to our society that enabled the development of online services, it became clear that new forms of authentication are required for situations in which the digital user’s identity must be checked as part of an assessment of service entitlement. In last decade lots of complicated systems have been developed aiming to solve this issue. But let’s go a little deeper into evolution of these systems.

A variety of authentication and identification systems have been developed in whole history of evolution of Information Technologies and Interactive Communication. Undoubted prerogative of most developments and innovations has been done by VeriSign Incorporation (www.verisign.com), which is no doubt the world leader of intelligence and security provider. In case one is up to write the history of the Internet and Information technologies, the best reference will be the History of VeriSign Inc, as any of its steps is a step towards the development of the Internet. Starting from 1995 when this company at first started to sell SSL Certificates they have had the great purposeful behaviour to establish high level security and trust in the Network. They definitely succeeded. Only a year later they opened the Digital ID centre, which was a big development in security providing and huge achievements in Network solutions. In 2004 VeriSign introduced Unified Authentication system. In 2006 Personal Identity Provider project has already been released which uses new technology: OpenID and it actually establishes a new era in the authorization systems. Before or meantime lots of projects have been lunched with the same technology, but the VeriSign’s project, in my opinion, expected to be the most successful and effective. This is a very interesting moment in the Internet development history in general. Actually when this kind of giants as VeriSign became interested in new technologies and started to develop these kind of projects, the technology itself became a choice of the future. The companies as Verisign actually have great power on shaping social software and especially on usage of these technologies by the consumers. Technology they bring to market is always considered to be the most rational and to suggest the most effective solutions. Here а question suggests itself: “Why and how did this company arrive to this technology and what kind of circumstances had been developed within the company?” These questions are very important from two aspects. Firstly, it is important to understand whether this technology is really the technology of future authentication systems. Secondly, whether it is possible to determine the rational chain of technological development - it will help to understand how long this technology will stay in use and what the next generation authentication systems will be like. This questions need to be researched as all trends show that both OpenID 1.0 and OpenID 2.0 technologies are in stage of great development and a lot of companies develop authentication projects based on this protocols. Probably this technology along with the new Digital ID services provided by e-governments will be the future of not only digital self identification, but general identification at all. And the attention which the Verisign pays on the development of Consumer Identity and Profile Management can serve as evidence to the previous statement. This very supposition of mines makes this research of top priority in the field of Personal Identity Management systems.

I hope that I will be able to continue this research and eventually come to substantial results.

Albert Poghosyan