The mission of Identity Policy and Practices' (IPP) is to provide tools and analysis to support government agencies in providing electronic service technology to businesses, other government customers and citizens. GSA provides system-wide surveillance of trust and privacy and support for initiative risk analysis and credentials. IPP develops uniform criteria standards to insure interoperability of vendor equipment. IPP provides system-wide policy, privacy, trust and interoperable standards for various levels of credential assurance.

Government agencies benefit from replacing current stove-piped authentication systems with a common unified authentication service. Governmentwide agencies will install their system as part of a federated system. Each agency benefits from development of a complete enterprise architecture system with vendors with interoperable products.

IPP includes the following organizations: E-authentication initiative for supporting governmentwide agency initiatives, the Federal Bridge Certification Authority and Federal Public Key Infrastructure for seamless use of PKI transactions, and Smart Card for community information on smart card policy, standards, interoperability and education.