When people sign in to Information Systems today, they usually present credentials with local significance, to be authenticated and gain access to internal functionality. Every user is therefore required to have a different login-password combination for each online service, or even different credentials for different roles within a service. As a result users tend to make poor password choices that are easy to remember, or even repeat the same login-password information for different services. This poses security threats to service providers and a privacy risk for end-users. The solution is to shift to identity management systems. Such a system will issue a digital identity for every user and will be able to control the full life-cycle of these identities, from creation to termination. A significant advantage of such a system is the single sign-on mechanism, whereby a single action of user authentication and authorization can permit the user to access multiple services without the need to execute any local authentication procedure. We first evaluate existing identity management implementations and then proceed to propose our own solution. Our Identity Management Infrastructure (IMI) differs from similar approaches. We propose a global scale deployment and we address problems that arise from such a design. Another difference is that our technique sets up the end-user as the sole holder of his/her identity information. This prevents the existence of a single point where multiple digital identities are held, which could become a target for potential attackers. The benefits (as seen from our approach) are improved security, accountability, reduced administration costs, ease of deployment and privacy protection. We provide accountability to digital identity holders, while allowing the user to remain anonymous and give service providers and end-users strong security guarantees about the security aspects of our approach. We finally study the security risks involved in our approach and how we address them.
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