© T.J. Kirkpatrick / Getty Images / AFP

State officials in Michigan and Pennsylvania have been awarded roughly $2.4 million in federal funds to test an online ID system that's been called a "driver's license for the internet," and it could soon exist from coast to coast.

The "National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace" program has been in development for years, but it's about to finally be rolled-out to a degree in two locales in order to see if using government-certified IDs on the web is something worth considering on a much larger scale.

"The goal is to put to bed once and for all our current ineffective and tedious system of using passwords for online authentication, which itself was a cure for the even more ineffective and tedious process of walking into a brick-and-mortar building and presenting a human being with two forms of paper identification," reporter Meghan Neal wrote for VICE's Motherboard website on Tuesday this week.

In theory, the program would also help curb a major problem rampant within both the worldwide web and the federal government: abuse. The United States government loses billions of dollars a year due to fraud, Neal reported, and the White House thinks that number could be drastically cut if a new system was implemented to authenticate the people that use government programs and websites alike.

"What if states had a better way to authenticate your identity online, so that you didn't have to make a trip to the DMV?" Jeremy Grant, the senior executive adviser for identity management at NIST, told the New York Times in 2011.

To see if there may be success on a national level, the NIST has awarded Michigan and Pennsylvania hefty grants to fund programs that would implement a "trusted identity" system

MORE @ http://rt.com/usa/155696-nist-trusted-identities-cyberspace/