Eve Maler – ForgeRock

Why nominated: Eve Maler is a leading proponent on a variety of topics including from privacy and digital identity, security, privacy, and consent, with a focus on fostering successful ecosystems and individual empowerment. Maler drives privacy and consent innovation for the ForgeRock Identity Platform, enabling user-controlled and compliant data sharing across web, mobile, and IoT contexts.

Profile: The last year has been a busy one for Maler – on several fronts. After the publication of UMA 2.0, which she chaired and edited, she published a series of auxiliary technical documentation and explanatory materials to enable broader implementation and adoption. These materials included detailed release notes, an implementer’s guide, and several sequence diagrams illustrating all the technical flows of the standards.

During the year, Maler has increased awareness of cybersecurity within her organization and the technology community through her leadership role in the development and maintenance of several key interoperability standards in the areas of security, identity, privacy, and consent. These included the OAuth standard used for delegated authorization to third- party applications without sharing one’s password; the User-Managed Access (UMA) standard used to enable user- controlled delegated authorization to other parties; the Health Relationship Trust (HEART) profiles used for patient- directed health data sharing; and the OpenMedReady profiles for smart health devices.

Maler also has also increased cybersecurity awareness in the last 12 months through frequent publishing and speaking on standards understanding and adoption, privacy and security awareness, privacy and security innovation, and related topics such as IoT security and privacy. She has delivered speeches at the RSA security conference, a keynote and several other speeches at the European Cloud and Identity Conference, several speeches at the Identiverse conference, and many others.

What colleagues say: “Eve Maler has been at the forefront of identity and privacy for over 20 years. She co-created XML, which transformed the way businesses interchange information. If that wasn’t enough, Eve co-developed many of the identity standards that we use today such as SAML, OAUTH, OAUTHconnect, and unified managed access. Her current efforts are hugely important to define identity standards in a modern, Internet connected world where privacy is not just a concern but a compliance mandate. She is the preeminent thinker in this area. One can argue that all of the advancements in identity lead back to her original thinking. I would encourage you to consider her for this award. The world needs more thinkers like her.”  – John Kindervag, Field CTO, Palo Alto Networks

–Doug Olenick