User centricity: A taxonomy and open issues*

Abstract

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 as defined by Lysyanskaya et al. [30], the latter one federation tokens as used in today's FIM protocols like Liberty.We raise the question where user-centric FIM systems may gowithin the limitations of the user-centricity paradigm as well as beyond them. Firstly, we investigate the existence of a universal user-centric FIM system that can achieve a superset of security and privacy properties as well as the characteristic features of both predominant classes. Secondly, we explore the feasibility of reaching beyond user-centricity, that is, allowing a user of a user-centric FIM system to again give away user-control by means of an explicit act of delegation. We do neither claim a solution for universal user-centric systems nor for the extension beyond the boundaries † Work performed during an internship at the IBM Zurich Research Laboratory in Switzerland.* Part of the work reported in this paper is supported by the European Commission through the IST Project PRIME. The PRIME project receives research funding from the European Community's Sixth Framework Programme and the Swiss Federal Office for Education and Science.Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. of user-centricity, however, we establish a starting point for both ventures by leveraging the properties of a credential-focused FIM system.

Mecanismo de controle e gerência de segurança para ambientes colaborativos

“…A adoção de um modelo de GId federada tem por objetivo remover a complexidade para o usuário, no que se refere a administrar um nome de usuário e senha para cada serviço que deseja acessar, permitindo que uma mesma identidade possa ser utilizada no acesso a diferentes serviços em domínios administrativos distintos [10,12].…”

A Mobile-Based Attribute Aggregation Architecture for User-Centric Identity Management

“…Its main objective is to empower users by returning control about who can access their personal data back to them, the truly legitimate data owners [41,12]. User centric identity management models provide the users with the means to effectively decide who can access their identity data.…”

Creating and Modelling Personal Socio-Economic Networks in On-Line Banking

“…Identity management on the Web has empowered users to gain control of the personal information that is exchanged between the parties involved, by considering user-centric architectural and usability aspects [17].…”