open network environment for Citizens (onefC)

The onefC project aims to build a digital identity management infrastructure to enable Internet users to reveal personal information to communication partners in a secure and controlled manner. The main goals of onefC are application and transport independence, decentralisation and privacy. Privacy in this context does not only mean to hide personal data, but rather the choice to show personal data to selected communication partners.

The onefC concept

The main idea behind onefC is the bundling of communication partners (or rather, their digital identities) and the communication acts in a session. To have application independent sessions on the Internet, onefC integrates a session layer above the transport layer (currently a prototype is ready for TCP/IP only), which is used instead of the standard sockets. Sessions have participants, which can be bound to digital identities and have any attributes, which are defined by ontologies in RDF(S). onefC defines the session handshake protocol and the identity data exchange protocol, as well as a base ontology for identity data, which needs to be extended by user (or service) part ontologies.

For a deeper insight, please have a look at our publications. A comprehending description will be published as a doctoral thesis (hopefully) later this year (in german).

The onefC prototype

A very basic prototype and an even more basic demo application is available for the demonstration of onefC. The demo application consists of a client part and a server part. The server part is a web application which says "Hello" to you. The client part consists of a web proxy which also holds a session controller, and a Firefox extension which provides the identity management client.

Please read the instructions to install and configure the software first, then you can see how to try it out yourself.

Publications

Publications concerning onefC can be found here.

Contact

For more information on onefC please contact the onefC discussion mailing list of our SourceForge project.