Efficient consistency achievement of federated identity and access management based on a novel self-adaptable approach

Abstract

Federated identity and access management (FIAM) systems enable a user to access services provided by various organizations seamlessly. In FIAM systems, service providers normally stipulate that their users show assertions issued by allied parties to use their services as well as determine user privileges based on attributes in the assertions. However, the integrity of the attributes is important under certain circumstances. In such a circumstance, all released assertions should reflect modifications made to user attributes. Despite the ability to adopt conventional certification revocation technologies, including CRL or OCSP, to revoke an assertion and request the corresponding user to obtain a new assertion, re-issuing an entirely new assertion if only one attribute, such as user location or other environmental information, is changed would be inefficient. Therefore, this work presents a self-adaptive framework to achieve consistency in federated identity and access management systems (SAFIAM). In SAFIAM, an identity provider (IdP), which authenticates users and provides user attributes, should monitor access probabilities according to user attributes. The IdP can then adopt the most efficient means of ensuring data integrity of attributes based on related access probabilities. While Internet-based services emerge daily that have various access probabilities with respect to their user attributes, the proposed self-adaptive framework significantly contributes to efforts to streamline the use of FIAM systems. Copyright © 2012 The Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers.