What is it about?
This paper was my summary of the field of identity management, as of 2010, based on the previous two decades' experience of working with IBM banking systems, Sun Microsystems identity management products, federated authentication, and privacy. It's my perspective on how that technical domain evolved over that period.
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Why is it important?
The identity and authentication systems we have now are incremental evolutions of previous attempts to formalise and automate the use of digital identity. For all their radical appearance, current solutions like "block chain for identity" still have to address the same basic issues - how to "proof" an identity in the first place, the relationship between identity and credentials, how to handle reputation and errors.
Perspectives
I hope the 2010 paper is a useful way to get a quick, readable summary of how we got to where we are now, and that it will help people design and deploy better identity management solutions in future. Digital identity tries to translate a very subtle interpersonal concept into technology, using what are actually quite rudimentary tools and components; the more we understand about the gap between the technology and the human concept, the better we will do. There's still a way to go...
Robin Wilton
Internet Society
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Identity Management, August 2010, Taylor & Francis,
DOI: 10.1201/9781420059823-c15.
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