To use GFIPM federation resources, begin by browsing through the lists and descriptions of available resources. These lists are available on each GFIPM participant page, which you can access via the links to the left, or directly below.

CISA | HSIN | JNET | RISS

The GFIPM project is a national initiative to improve the state of information sharing between state and local law enforcement agencies and across legal jurisdictions within the U.S., using federated identity and privilege management (FIPM) technology. It is jointly sponsored by the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security, and it is under the oversight of the Global Justice Information Sharing Initiative. The project has been ongoing since late 2005, with the initial goal of building a small information sharing demonstration system. The long-term, multi-year goal of the GFIPM project is to grow the system into a fully operational, nationwide information sharing network. In order to reach this goal, we need test users to use the system and provide feedback about its usefulness and usability.

One of the most significant obstacles to sharing information between law enforcement agencies is the administrative overhead required for each agency to create and manage user accounts for the users of other agencies. For example, suppose that the police departments of two neighboring counties, Alpha County and Beta County, want to begin an information sharing program with each other. Also suppose that each county has 100 police officers that will need access to the shared information. Without FIPM technology, it would be necessary for Alpha County to provide a user account for every officer from Beta County, so that each Beta County officer could access the available Alpha County resources. Similarly, Beta County would need to provide an account for every officer from Alpha County. Therefore, the IT staff for each county would need to manage user accounts for all 100 of its own officers, plus the 100 officers from the other county, for a total of 200 user accounts. In addition, each officer would need to keep track of his/her login credentials for both counties.

This approach might be acceptable as long as only two counties are involved in the information sharing program. But what would happen if fifty additional counties wanted to participate in this program? The manageability and usefulness of the information sharing program would rapidly deteriorate as the IT departments of each county struggle to keep up with the workload required to manage thousands of user accounts. And each officer would struggle to keep track of dozens of usernames, passwords, crypto tokens, and other credentials that are required to access each county.s resources. Clearly, for this type of information sharing program to work, there must be a better way for the IT staff and police officers to manage their accounts and login credentials. Federated identity and privilege management (FIPM) provides a solution to this problem.

FIPM eliminates the need for each officer to maintain an account with each county. Instead, each officer needs to maintain only one account . with his/her home county . and through that account he/she can access the information resources of all counties that participate in the information sharing program. This type of arrangement is called a federation, and each officer.s account is called a federated identity, because it can be used to access all available resources throughout the federation.

In the GFIPM project, we have built a web-based federation that uses FIPM technology to create a seamless .single sign-on. experience for our users. This means that as a user, you need to login only one time, with your home organization, in order to access any information resources that have been provided by the organizations in the federation.