Identity management

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In information systems, identity management, sometimes referred to as identity management systems, is the management of the identity life cycle of entities (subjects or objects) during which:

  1. the identity is established:
    1. a name (or number) is connected to the subject or object;
    2. the identity is re-established: a new or additional name (or number) is connected to the subject or object;
  2. the identity is described:
    1. one or more attributes which are applicable to this particular subject or object may be assigned to the identity;
    2. the identity is newly described: one or more attributes which are applicable to this particular subject or object may be changed;
  3. the identity is destroyed.

Contents

[edit] Identity Management in Public and Private Domain

Identities may be managed by either the entities themselves or by other parties, which may be private parties, for example employers or shops, or public parties like personal records offices and immigration services.

Identity management in the public domain is known by the name of National Identity Management. Following the 9/11 attacks, attempts are being made worldwide to improve the quality of National Identity Management, particularly through the application of biometrics to identify documents. However, it is doubtful whether biometrics will stop terrorists.[1]

[edit] Electronic Identity Management (IdM)

Identity management (IdM) has developed several interpretations in the IT industry and is now associated as the management of a user's credentials and how they might log onto an online system. However, this view is quite narrow. The focus on identity management goes back to the development of directories such as X.500 where a namespace is used to hold named objects that represent real life "identified" entities such as countries, organizations, applications, subscribers and devices. X.509 defined certificates that carried identity attributes as two directory names, the certificate subject and the certificate issuer. X.509 certificates and PKI systems are used to prove one's online "identity". Therefore we can consider identity management as the management of information (as held in a directory) that represents real life identified items (users, devices, services, etc). Engineering such systems means that explicit information and identity engineering tasks become necessary.

The term identity engineering is used where one puts engineering effort into managing large numbers of interrelated items that have identifiers or names.

[edit] IdM - Three Perspectives

In the real world context of engineering online systems, identity management can be given three perspectives:

  • The pure identity paradigm - creation, management and deletion of identities without regard to access or entitlements;
  • The user access (log-on) paradigm - a smart card and its associated data that a customer uses to log on to a service or services (a traditional view);
  • The service paradigm - a system that delivers personalized, role-based, online, on-demand, multimedia (content), presence-based services to users and their devices.

[edit] The User Access Paradigm

Identity Management in the user "log on" perspective would be an integrated system of business processes, policies and technologies that enable organizations to facilitate and control their users' access to critical online applications and resources — while protecting confidential personal and business information from unauthorized users. It represents a category of interrelated solutions that are employed to administer user authentication, access rights, access restrictions, account profiles, passwords, and other attributes supportive of users' roles/ profiles on one or more applications or systems.

[edit] The Service Paradigm

In the service paradigm perspective, where organizations are evolving their systems to the converged services world, the scope of identity management becomes much larger and its application more critical. The scope of identity management includes all the resources of the company that are used to deliver online services. This includes devices, network equipment, servers, portals, content, applications and products as well as a user's credentials, address books, preferences, entitlements and telephone numbers. See Service Delivery Platform and Directory service.

Today many organizations are facing a major clean-up in their systems to bring identity coherence to their world. This coherence is required in order to deliver unified services to very large numbers of users on demand - cheaply and with security and single customer view facilities.

[edit] Emerging Fundamental Points of IdM

  • IdM provides a significantly greater opportunity to an online business beyond the process of authenticating and authorizing users via cards, tokens and web access control systems.
  • User-based IdM is evolving from username/password and web access control systems to those that embrace preferences, parental controls, entitlements, policy-based routing, presence and loyalty schemes.
  • IdM provides the focus to deal with system-wide data quality and integrity issues often encountered by fragmented databases and workflow processes.
  • IdM embraces what the user actually gets in terms of products and services and how and when they do that. Therefore IdM applies to the products and services of an organization such as health, media, insurance, travel or government services, as well as how these products are provisioned and assigned to (or removed from) "entitled" users.
  • IdM can deliver a single customer view that includes their presence and location, single product and services and single IT infrastructure and network views to the respective parties and therefore IdM is related intrinsically to information engineering and information security and privacy.
  • IdM covers the machinery (system infrastructure components) that delivers such services because a user's service could be assigned to: a particular network technology; content title; usage rights; media server; mail server; soft switch; voice mail box; product catalogue set; security domain; billing system; CRM or help desk and so on.
  • Critical to IdM projects are considerations of the online services of an organization (what are the users logging on to) and how are they managed from an internal perspective and the customer self care perspective.

[edit] IdM Solutions

Solutions which fall under the category of Identity Management:

Management of Identities

Access Control

Directory Services

  • Identity Repository (directory services for administration of user account attributes)
  • Metadata Replication/Synchronization
  • Directory Virtualization (virtual directory)
  • e-business scale directory systems
  • Next generation systems - CADS and CADS SDP

Other categories

Standards Initiatives

[edit] References

  1. ^ TIAS Business School Eindhoven - Thesis on Biometrics in National Identity Management

[edit] See also

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