Consolidate the identity management systems to identify the effective actor based on the actor relationship for the internet of things

Abstract

Service providers in the Internet of Things need to truly establish the identity of the user(s) as the effective actor(s) (EA) identity rather than the communicating objects to offer the right services. Objects are seamlessly interconnected by anyone, anywhere, and anytime on behalf of the EA. An actor in the IoT is any identified entity, which interacts with other entities over the Internet. It could have different identities that are managed by different identity management systems (IdMs) in every domain they interact with which are not always interoperable with each other. Moreover, the communicated objects identities can also be used to identify their EAs identities based on their relationship. The actor relationships are not always fixed; they can be changed or even revoked. Therefore, a global identity management system (GIdM) is proposed to consolidate the IdMs in order to establish the identity of a requester across domain. A GIdM facilitates the establishment of dynamic trust relationships and the validation of the EA identity based on the relationship type and a set of identity attributes. Comparisons between the proposed solution (GIdM) with the state-of-the-art works show that the GIdM system can overcome the current limitations for establishing the EA identity globally in the IoT.