User-Centric Identity Management in Open Mobile Environments

Abstract

Two levels of identity management can be determined. The first levelconsiders Enterprise Identity Management which is currently on theroadmap of most companies dealing with huge knowledge bases of employeesand/or customers. At this level identity management means (1) to provideemployees with role-based access to documents and resources and (2) toconsolidate and concatenate partial customer identities forsimplifications in customer administration.Almost at the same time the second level of identity managementoccurred. Personalised context-aware services have begun to enter,particularly, the mobile communication market and, obviously, detaileduser profiles are essential to provide reasonable personalised services.These services are based on the user's current location, hisenvironment, and personal preferences. Here, identity management becomesa key technology in order to keep those additional information undercontrol. However, this pursuit of control finally leads to severeimplications due to privacy violation.Hence, a third level of identity management has to be introduced:User-centric Identity Management. User-centric identity managementallows the user to keep at least some control over his personal datawhere several different approaches in this paper have to be discussed.Specifically, a framework will be described which adds user-centricidentity management to a context-aware mobile services platform. Thisplatform has been already designed to support and dynamically combineservices especially of small- and medium-sized independent serviceproviders.