As the NSTIC work program evolves, we can expect to see multiple proposed solutions put forward that promise to deliver a new generation of online services. To the extent that the various solutions are competing for adoption, it will be necessary to evaluate them against each other for relative costs and benefits. Such comparisons will be quite challenging because proposed solutions will be built on disparate and seemingly incommensurate modelsincommensurable models (architectures, protocol stacks).
What follows is intended as a first step toward an analytical framework that would allow us to meaningfully compare and contrast widely different solutions to given usage scenarios in the general space of web security. To take an example a SAML-based solution to a given problem might initially appear quite orthogonal to UMA-based solution to the same problem. Yet for the reasons cited above it will be important to evaluate and compare one against the other.
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