About OpenID
The OpenID Foundation’s vision is to help people assert their identity wherever they choose. And our mission is to lead the global community in creating identity standards that are secure, interoperable, and privacy-preserving.
Founded in 2007, the OpenID Foundation (OIDF) is a non-profit open standards body developing identity and security specifications that serve billions of consumers across millions of applications.
The Foundation offers support for implementers and the community at large in several ways such as:
- Due diligence: The Foundation ensures that members understand OIDF standards and the benefits of implementing them. This includes actively sharing OIDF and member learnings and insights that tend to resonate especially well with governments and managing entities building new ecosystems.
- Liaisons with partners: The Foundation will develop a liaison with a particular global, regional, or national partner, such as a standards body or governance entity. These liaisons and partnerships with other standards bodies, non-profits, and private entities help the Foundation deliver on its mission.
- Conformance testing and certification: The Foundation offers conformance test suites on our mature standards at no cost and nominal fees for self-certification. Our certification program has been selected by government partners like the UK and Brazilian authorities to ensure their ecosystem participants conform to their requirements. The Foundation is also developing a 3rd party licensing model, to create a formal arrangement with local entities that need to combine certification on OIDF standards into a single operational process (e.g., functional, and operational requirements that form part of a wider ecosystem implementation.
- Local profile development and maintenance: The Foundation encourages partners to seriously consider developing their OIDF profile in partnership with the Foundation. This enables the local entity to maintain control over the profile and decisions, while leveraging the expertise of the Foundation in development, maintenance, and testing for the OIDF profile. With this approach local entities save time and money at the start and over time, reduces security risks of divergence, and reduces the risk of technical barriers to achieve cross border interoperability.
- Interfaces with other standards: The Foundation also helps members understand how the Foundation’s specifications interfaces with other liaison partner standards like FIDO, W3C VCs, or ISO 18013-5 Mobile Driving Licenses.
Membership in the Foundation is not required, but welcomed, to contribute to working groups or community groups. Contributors only need to sign a Contribution Agreement. All working groups operate openly with decisions on specifications being consensus-led. All OIDF specifications and conformance test suites are freely available for anyone to use under the protection of the OpenID Foundations’ IPR Policy.
Participants can join as private entities, governments, non-profits, and as individuals with accessible member dues. With this structure, the Foundation seeks to ensure a sustainable, and accessible model for the global community. For noting, the Foundation is funded roughly one-third by membership, one-third by certification fees, and one-third by directed funding projects requested by members.