Portable user-centric identity management

Abstract

User-centric identity management has recently received significant attention for handling private and critical identity attributes. The notable idea of usercentric identity management allows users to control their own digital identities. Current user-centric identity management approaches are mainly focused on interoperable architectures between existing identity management systems. Normally, users can access the Internet from various places such as home, office, school or public Internet café. We observe that the importance of portability of the a user's digital identity should be addressed in the user-centric identity management practices. In other words, users should be able to export their digital identities and transfer them to various computers in a secure manner. In this paper, we focus on the portability issue of the Identity Metasystem and describe three possible types of portabilityenhanced Identity Metasystem model including our implementation experience. © 2008 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.