in Proceeding
| Authors | Toby Baier, Christian Zirpins, Winfried Lamersdorf |
| Title | Digital Identity: How To Be Someone On The Net |
| Published in | e-Society 2003 |
| Editor | Antonio palma dos Reis, Pedro Isaias |
| Publisher | IADIS Press Lisbon, Portugal |
| Medium | Volume II |
| Organization | IADIS International association for development of the information society |
| Date | June 2003 |
| Pages | 815-820 |
| Abstract | Personal communication and collaboration has been and still is a major driver of the Internet. A severe drawback in human centric electronic interaction is the fuzziness of the image that the co-operation partners have of each other (i.e. their respective identities ) especially in different and varying application contexts. This uncertainty adversely affects increasingly important soft co-operation factors like, e.g., trust and social behavior, and should therefore be minimized whenever possible. In addition, the lack of a homogenous representation of digital identities results, even at the systemlevel, in many cases in increased and unnecessary administration tasks like, e.g., keeping track on user-ids and passwords or typing the same information several times. This makes communication inefficient and error-prone and may introduce various privacy threats. On the other hand, neither the minimal identity representation which is already used at the system s level (e.g. a user-id used for security reasons), nor the emerging proprietary efforts for identifying users uniquely at the application level (e.g. for single sign on purposes) suffice for comprising the user s identity fully as needed for co-operation of individual human beings. In order to cope with such problems of proper electronic user identification , we propose an open and generic notion of a digital identity that is generally applicable and includes an extensible set of identity facets on the system- as well as the user-level. Such a unique digital identity for all possible Internet communication and co-operation tasks enables users to recognize distinct co-operation partners uniquely in many different contexts but also allows for revealing individual (i.e. only partial) views on such information whenever necessary. Therefore, such a facility enriches communication by semantic information about co-operation partners and thus enables faster, more secure and trustworthy collaboration. In summary, this paper proposes the concept of a digital identity and specifies what challenges are to be met when building an open, distributed, decentralized system infrastructure for digital identities. |
| Document |  |
| Other formats | Din 1501 |