Heather Flanagan

© 2022 IDPro

Abstract

Editor’s note for Volume 1, Issue 8.

Over two dozen articles. Nearly 100,000 words. It is amazing to see how the IDPro Body of Knowledge (BoK) has grown since its first publication in March 2020. The goal of the BoK has always been to build a resource that would support identity practitioners at every point in their career. Whether an individual picks up the baton of IAM because there’s no one else in their organization to do it, or whether someone has been working in IAM for years but need a more detailed understanding of some aspect of their job, the BoK exists to support their search for knowledge.

IAM is probably one of the most wide-reaching disciplines in the world today. While details like industry-specific legislation (e.g., HIPAA) and regional regulations (e.g., GDPR) change some of the implementation, the fundamentals of IAM remain the same. The first volume of the BoK, still a work in progress, is focused on collecting those fundamentals. Future volumes will move beyond that into more advanced topics relating to specific sector requirements and the complex details that make the answer to almost every IAM question “it depends.”

In Issue 8, we have a new article, User Provisioning in the Enterprise , by Ian Glazer, Lori Robinson, and Mat Hamlin. We also have three previously-published articles— Account Recovery by Dean H. Saxe, Introduction to Policy-Based Access Controls by Mary McKee, and Federation Simplified by Patrick Lunney—that have gone through our refresh process . And for each of those articles, we had at least two peer reviewers, the BoK Committee members, and the IDPro Board review those articles to make sure it supports the goal of the BoK. As always, I am deeply grateful to all of them for the time they spent to make these articles a reality.

As the BoK matures, we are focusing now on specific areas where articles are needed to complete Volume 1. For example:

• Passwords

• Principle of Least Privilege

• Details on Multi-factor authentication

• Details of RBAC

• Details of ABAC

• Use case: integrating with social media (as based on the IAM Reference Architecture ; see Cloud Service Authenticates Via Delegation - SAML)

If you are interested in submitting any of those articles or would like to know more about what other articles we’re looking for, please reach out to editor@idpro.org . Remember that sometimes the best way to learn something is to try and teach it to someone else; these articles can help you learn more on any of the topics you are interested in the field of IAM. We look forward to having you share what you’re learning and what you know!