The policy infrastructure is an environment supporting recursion, that is, self-reference in its relevant concepts. Thus, access to the various policy mechanisms is achieved through transactions to which policy is relevant. Identity of the potential participants in a transaction establishes a necessary characteristic for the conveyance of trust, and as such is a central aspect of the application of policy; that is, policy may be ascribed to different identities as well as to transactions. It is worth noting that provision of policy, as an aspect of both parties of a transaction, requiring negotiation between the two prior to a transaction, is absent from most, if not all serious identification systems today. In fact in many, if not most discussions about identity concepts and identification systems, the inference generally made is that the scope of use of identity, that is the policy relative to processes keyed to identity, is the purview of the receiver of identity rather the provider of identity. Consequently, since most identification systems today make use of identifiers through which the identity of people is ostensibly authenticated, the general de facto policy is that if those identifiers are compromised, then they can be used by other people to impersonate the identity of the true target of the identifiers and, through this theft of identity, they can perform any action or make any claim that the impersonated person could perform or make if they were physically present and participating in the transaction in question. This obviously points out an important asymmetry with such identification systems and leads one to at least consider alleviating this situation through another assumption, the provision of user-controlled policy definition mechanisms.

Specifically, neither assumption currently warrants a default status. Rather, to correct the current problem, the policy through which the use of identity is established would have to be expanded in law and then provided for within identification systems. That is, the ultimate source of the policy should either be general law or it should be the result of a negotiation between the provider and the receiver of identity on a transaction-by-transaction basis. There are a wide range of issues from which policy could be defined under the personal control of each individual with the definition of policy itself being the subject of policy definitions related to the strength of the authentication mechanism used to establish the differential identity of a person. Authentication protocols can range from high trust variants, perhaps requiring a person to go to an office equipped with very secure and accurate biometric sensors with smart card access, to low trust variants, perhaps only requiring a person to present a security token, for example a Radio-Frequency Identification tag (an RFID token) at a turnstile. Policy allowing use of varying levels of security for entry of authentication parameters (biometrics, personal identification numbers, etc.) allows for a variety of performance levels when an identity token is presented as well as a variety of trust levels in the resulting authentication.

Through policy definition, it can be specified what trust can the receiver of identity authentication place in materials or services attested to by a specific authenticated identity. For example, a person may want to disavow any trust being placed in casual e-mail messages. Some e-mail messages could be considered akin to a highly trusted, absolutely truthful document to which the signer attests, under pain of liability. Others would be considered part of a highly informal mode of communication, worthy at one extreme of simply passing along gossip. So, it should be possible for a person to establish a policy regarding the trustworthiness of specific messages and allow negotiation and then well defined policy for the sending and receiving of messages. If one side attests only to passing along gossip, and the other side doesn’t want to hear any gossip, then no exchange takes place.

The rules governing physical interactions are immutable and they establish a policy infrastructure through which our most basic interactions are effected. Of course, as we noted back in Chapter 3, the initial conditions established at the start of interactions as well as uncertainty in the outcome of

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