Foreword

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The Networked State Services Development Goal (State Services Commission 2005a) is that, by June 2010, the operation of government will have been transformed through the use of the Internet.  The challenge will be to transform government through enabling technology, so that individuals and businesses have a better and more consistent experience in their dealings with government, agencies work more closely with their customers and with each other, and the cost of delivering services, both online and through other channels, is reduced.  This will require agencies to move beyond one-way provision of information to two-way transactions.

Moving to two-way transactions requires parties to be confident of the identity of those they are transacting with over the Internet.  This is 'authentication'. 

The Government has recognised the importance and significance of authentication to the e government programme.  In 2004 the State Services Commission was directed to undertake a programme of work to develop all-of-government shared services for online authentication. 

Integral to this programme of work was the development of a suite of authentication standards to be incorporated into the New Zealand E-government Interoperability Framework (NZ e-GIF).  These standards give effect to the planning advice from the State Services Commission's 2004 Authentication for e-government: Best Practice Framework for Authentication. They outline current accepted good practice for the design (or re-design) of the authentication component of online services that require confidence in the identity of transacting parties.

This New Zealand Security Assertion Messaging Standard prescribes messaging standards for communicating a range of security assertions (authentication, identity attributes and authorisation) in New Zealand government online services.  The Standard is abbreviated to NZ SAMS. In this release the NZ SAMS will focus on authentication assertions. In later releases NZ SAMS will add identity attributes and authorisation.