User centricity: a taxonomy and open issues

User centricity is a significant concept in federated identity management (FIM), as it provides for stronger user control and privacy. However, several notions of user-centricity in the FIM community render its semantics unclear and hamper future research in this area. Therefore, we consider user-centricity abstractly and establish a comprehensive taxonomy encompassing user-control, architecture, and usability aspects of user-centric FIM. On the systems layer, we discuss user-centric FIM systems and classify them into two predominant variants with significant feature sets. We distinguish credential-focused systems, which advocate offline identity providers and long-term credentials at a user’s client, and relationship-focused systems, which rely on the relationships between users and online identity providers that create short-term credentials during transactions. Note that these two notions of credentials are quite different. The further one encompasses cryptographic credentials...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: DIM
• Authors: Abhilasha Bhargav-Spantzel, Jan Camenisch, Thomas Groß, Dieter Sommer
• Keywords: DIM 2006, Universal User-centric Fim, User-centric Fim, User-centric Fim Systems