User-centric Mobile Identity Management Services

Abstract

Digital identity is the ground necessary to guarantee that the Internet infrastructure is strong enough to meet basic expectations such as security and privacy. Anywhere anytime mobile computing is becoming true. In this ambient intelligent world, the choice of the identity management mechanisms will have a large impact on social, cultural, business and political aspects: privacy is a human need and the all of society would suffer from the de-mise of privacy; people have hectic life and cannot spend their whole time administering their digital identities. The choice of identity mechanisms will change the social, cultural, business and political environment. Furthermore, the identity management is also a promising topic for modern society. Recent technological advance in user identity management has highlighted the paradigm of federated identity management and user- centric identity management as improved alternatives. The first one empowers the management of identity and the second the users to actively manage their identity information and profiles. It also allows providers to deal easily with privacy aspects regarding user expectations. This problem has been tackled with some trends and emerging solutions. Firstly, we provide an overview of identity management from identity 1.0 to identity 2.0 with emphasis on user centric approaches. Also we survey how have evolved the requirements for user-centric identity management and their associated technologies with emphasis on the federated approaches and user-centricity. Secondly, we will focus on related standards XRI and LID issued from Yadis project, and platforms mainly ID-WSF, OpenID, InfoCard, Sxip and Higgins. At the end, we treat the identity management in the field of mobility and focus on the future of mobile identity management.