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Digital Identity Management and Trust Negotiation

This document discusses digital identity management and trust negotiation. It provides an overview of digital identity management, focusing on recent federated approaches like Liberty Alliance, WS-Federation, Shibboleth, and Microsoft CardSpace. It also discusses identity management in grid computing systems and the trust negotiation paradigm. Finally, it presents a federated attribute management and trust negotiation solution that provides a distributed approach to managing user identities and attributes with negotiation capabilities.

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Joshua Akangah
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68 views2 pages

Digital Identity Management and Trust Negotiation

This document discusses digital identity management and trust negotiation. It provides an overview of digital identity management, focusing on recent federated approaches like Liberty Alliance, WS-Federation, Shibboleth, and Microsoft CardSpace. It also discusses identity management in grid computing systems and the trust negotiation paradigm. Finally, it presents a federated attribute management and trust negotiation solution that provides a distributed approach to managing user identities and attributes with negotiation capabilities.

Uploaded by

Joshua Akangah
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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5

Digital Identity Management and Trust


Negotiation

As more and more activities and processes such as shopping, discussion, enter-
tainment and business collaboration are conducted in the cyber world, digital
identities, be them user names, passwords, digital certificates, or biometric
features and digital identity management have become fundamental to under-
pinning accountability in business relationships, controlling the customization
of the user experience, protecting privacy, and adhering to regulatory con-
trols. In its broadest sense, identity management revolves around the enter-
prise process of adding or removing (provisioning) digital identity information
and managing their authentication and associated access rights (policy) to in-
formation systems and applications (“access management”). Hence, digital
identity management is strictly intertwined with identification technologies,
such as biometrics, and authorization and access control technologies. More-
over, digital identity management requires us to consider at the same time
aspects and technologies related to usability and management. Digital iden-
tity is not a static information too. It may evolve over time, and hence digital
identity management requires us to consider and apply change management
techniques to digital identity representations.
Digital Identity management is an emerging research field which addresses
the aspects mentioned above. Moreover, the emergence of SOA and Web
services-based enterprise information systems requires us to consider not only
the technical aspects of distribution but also the impact of service autonomy
on identity management solutions.
This chapter covers all relevant notions related with identity management
and then discusses how digital identity management can be combined with
negotiation techniques to provide a more flexible but still privacy-preserving
solution.
The chapter first provides an overview of the main concepts related to
digital identity management, focusing on recent federated approaches, namely
Liberty-Alliance initiative [166], WS-Federation [170], the Shibboleth System
[138], and Microsoft CardSpace. Issues related to identity management in
the context of grid computing systems are discussed, in that these systems

E. Bertino et al., Security for Web Services and Service-Oriented Architectures,


DOI 10.1007/978-3-540-87742-4 5,  c Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2010
80 5 Digital Identity Management and Trust Negotiation

represent a significant application context for SOA and digital identity man-
agement. The chapter also presents the trust negotiation paradigm, its main
concepts and protocols, and possible applications of it in the context of fed-
erated identity management systems. Finally, to show the advantages of the
digital identity management and trust negotiation approaches, the chapter
presents a federated attribute management and trust negotiation solution,
which provides a truly distributed approach to the management of user iden-
tities and user attributes with negotiation capabilities.

5.1 Overview of Digital Identity Management

Digital identity management is the set of processes, tools, social contracts,


and a supporting infrastructure for creating, maintaining, utilizing, and ter-
minating a digital identity. These tools allow administrators to manage large
populations of users, applications, and systems securely and efficiently. They
support selective assignment of roles and privileges that makes it easier to
comply with regulatory controls and contribute to privacy-sensitive access con-
trols. Identity management systems (IdM systems, from now on) have strong
links with the management of security, trust, and privacy in a given system.
Traditionally, identity management has been a core component of system se-
curity environments for the maintenance of account information to control
log in access to systems or to a limited set of applications. Additionally, the
identity of users has been the core of many authentication and authorization
systems.
Recently, however, the scope of identity management has expanded, with
its becoming a key enabler for electronic business. Identity management sys-
tems are now fundamental to underpinning accountability in business relation-
ships, controlling the customization of the user experience, protecting privacy,
and adhering to regulatory controls.
In this section we discuss the main concepts related to IdM systems. We
begin with a brief overview of the notion of digital identity and identifiers,
and then outline the most significant identity management frameworks.

Digital identity and identifiers

Digital identity can be defined as the digital representation of the information


known about a specific individual or organization. Such information can be
represented and conveyed in various ways, from log in names and passwords
to digital credentials and biometric features.
IdM systems, according to the typical representation in SOA architectures,
define identities by profiles of attributes associated with an individual. Identity
attributes are typically stored at ad hoc Identity Providers (or IdPs, for short)
which disclose identifiers as dictated by the authentication or authorization
protocols in place.

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