The revolutionary MICA™ technology began in 2000 as an architecture for business-to-business collaboration across different computing platforms. The technology was part of a security architecture being designed to allow distributed merchant networks to conduct secure transactions without the need for a dedicated centralized server. The presentation of this design happened to have a US military contractor in attendance.
The demo led to an instant interest in a security-only version from the US military, with a research project approved, with DARPA funding. The research and development took place in an elaborate research facility in Los Alamos, NM where access to the highest level security related expertise was provided. The outcome of that project was the adoption and licensing of that technology by the US Government.
As time passed, further research and development was performed until the ideas which surrounded the earlier thinking morphed into the basis of what is now MICA technology. The original, security-based design matured to encompass a much broader set of functionality, yielding a truly revolutionary hybrid concept of secure-identity/negotiated-relationships/managed-communications/dynamic ontology . . . MICA.
MICA Technology Inc (“MTI”) is headquartered in Boston, MA. The company has developed this simple, modern and elegant approach for solving of the most important issues in an increasingly connected world of people: identities, systems, information and the ontologies that describe and link them.
MICA technology represents more than a new twist on an old way of doing things. MICA represents the logical next step in the evolution of electronic communications. As we illustrate in Figure 1 below, in the very beginning of computing, users didn’t really have an identity – they used dumb terminals to access a single mainframe. There was no real interaction between most users.
As time, and technology, progressed, this evolved into the client-server architecture, where users did have an identity, but its basis, and thus the basis of all interactions, was set by the system. Users in one system couldn’t interact with users in another system. What passed as Identity was more an evolution of the login name –an identifier, not a true identity.
The internet changed that, such that interactions became a dominant activity of computing. However, each user’s identity was still completely defined by the domain that conferred and authenticated that identity. Thus the basis of interactions, indeed all activity, was the domain, such as AOL, Yahoo!, corporate intranets, etc. This was necessary, as there was no independent way to verify identity that didn’t originate in one domain or another.
So the trajectory across the past 20 years has been increasingly well defined identity, and increasing mobility. This trajectory finds its fruition in the MICA technology – a secure, domain-agnostic way of identifying uniquely who you are in the context of individual relationships and negotiated terms. It does this by in effect creating two ‘keys’, one that is retained by the user, and a second that is embedded in whatever application being used, be it email, Microsoft Word, or a video player, etc. Thus identity has as its basis not the domain, but these two keys. Importantly, this bilateral connection doesn’t require a domain to ‘negotiate’ what each party can, or cannot do. And thus these terms can be easily changed, and allow for much more detail than a one-size fits all policy would allow.