A New User-Centric Identity Management Infrastructure for Federated Systems

Abstract

In todays Information Systems, users present credentials with local significance, to be authenticated and gain access to internal functionality. Users have different login-password combinations for each online service, or even different credentials for different roles within a service. As a result they tend to make poor password choices that are easy to remember, or even repeat the same login-password information on different services. This poses security threats to service providers and a privacy risk for end-users. The solution is to shift to identity management systems. Such a system will issue a digital identity for every user and will be able to control the full life-cycle of these identities, from creation to termination. Another aspect of such a system is the single sign-on mechanism, whereby a single action of user authentication and authorization can permit the user to access multiple services. The benefits are improved security, accountability and privacy protection.

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