Identity Assurance in Open Networks
Ivonne Thomas, Christoph Meinel · IGI Global eBooks · 2012
Identity assurance is the degree of confidence another party, such as a service provider, can have in the belief that identity in the digital world actually matches with “real-life” identity. In open networks, establishing this confidence is not an easy task as participants are often located in different trust domains. Moreover, with the spread of open identity management systems, identity information is often held by designated identity provisioning services, so called identity providers. If another party shall be enabled to rely on received information, it ought to know how much confidence it can put into the assertions of the sender. In the intent to create a global standard, governments, commercial organizations, and academia alike have published common guidelines for identity assurance as part of so-called identity assurance frameworks. This chapter provides a state-of-the-art overview of identity assurance frameworks and describes them along important trust factors of identity providers. Furthermore, limitations of identity assurance frameworks are identified and highlighted as potential fields for further research. As an outlook to future developments, a small case study is presented that introduces trust levels for attributes in order to enable a service provider to distinguish between different qualities of trust, thus providing more flexibility in the way identity assurance is achieved in open networks.