Establishing and protecting digital identity in federation systems

We develop solutions for the security and privacy of user identity information in a federation. By federation we mean a group of organizations or service providers which have built trust among each other and enable sharing of user identity information amongst themselves. Our solution supports a step by step approach according to which an individual can first establish a digital identity followed by a secure and protected use of such identity. We first introduce a flexible approach to establish a single sign-on (SSO) ID in a federation. Then we show how a user can leverage this SSO ID to establish certified and uncertified user identity attributes without the dependence on PKI for user authentication. This makes the process more usable and enhances privacy. The major contribution of this paper is a novel solution for protection against identity theft of these identity attributes. Our approach is based on the use of zero-knowledge proof protocols and distributed hash tables. Revoca...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: DIM
• Authors: Abhilasha Bhargav-Spantzel, Anna Cinzia Squicciarini, Elisa Bertino
• Keywords: DIM 2005, Distributed Hash Tables, Information Management, User Identity, User Identity Information