The AGL community is comprised of a diverse set of member companies that are collaborating on enabling the next generation of in-vehicle software systems. This blog series highlights AGL members and how they are contributing to open source software solutions that will benefit the entire automotive industry.
Name: Ashley Stevenson
Title: Identity Technology Director
Company: ForgeRock
Can you tell me a little bit about ForgeRock, your role and why the company is investing in open source?
ForgeRock is the Digital Identity Management company transforming the way organizations interact securely with customers, employees, devices, and things. Organizations adopt the ForgeRock Identity Platform as their digital identity system of record to monetize customer relationships, address stringent regulations for privacy and consent (GDPR, HIPAA, FCC privacy, etc.), and leverage the internet of things (IoT).
We understand the business impact of open source. Our founders came from Sun Microsystems, which was a major contributor to open source software, and they built ForgeRock around some of the open source identity capabilities developed there.
I work in the Office of the CTO and focus on technology innovations around IoT and Identity Relationship Management, with a specific focus on the automotive industry. My team, working together with the smart folks at IoT.bzh, is responsible for the development of the AGL Identity Agent and associated bindings that enables things like in-vehicle personalization in the IVI system, and trusted identities of vehicles for securing V2V, V2C, V2X use cases.
How is your organization involved in AGL? Please include any workgroups or board/committee positions.
ForgeRock joined AGL in the Spring of 2016. Our vision is to bring digital identity to the connected vehicle ecosystem to help OEMs build strong relationships with their customers, whether for online customer identity management, personalized in-vehicle experiences, or trusted V2V and V2X transactions based on the secure digital identity of the vehicle.
We are currently the only identity company working with AGL and are contributing our digital identity capabilities to the AGL Unified Code Base. We believe this will help drive OEM adoption by solving some of the foundational security and user experience challenges facing the industry today.
Has ForgeRock contributed any code back to AGL?
Last year we completed the first version of the AGL Identity Binder, which allows a user to authenticate to the car (in this case a Renesas Porter or RCar-3 development board), and to retrieve the user’s profile and personalized settings from the ForgeRock back-end identity services.
How do you plan to use or support the AGL Unified Code Base?
We are continuing our work with IoT.bzh this year with plans on exciting new mobility features. Our goal is to integrate these features into the “Big Green Machine” AGL Demo for CES 2018. We are also working to have the next versions of our contributions rolled in as part of the default AGL build. These features include a new version of the Identity Agent and a default set of authentication bindings, along with a user profile page in the IVI.
How do you anticipate AGL changing the automotive technology landscape?
We believe AGL will provide innovations that solve important technology problems for the automotive industry. AGL is already solving the software development issues associated with high-tech infotainment systems in modern vehicles, and we believe this same group of passionate members can create solutions to other pressing issues that OEMs are facing, such as monetizing services through their vehicle platform to create a key revenue stream in addition to selling vehicle units.
What advice would you give to someone considering joining AGL?
I’d recommend attending one of the AGL conferences. Listen to the presentations and talk to the sponsors. My experience has been that everyone is open, collaborative (and opinionated–which is a good thing!). It won’t take long for you to figure out if AGL membership is for you 🙂
