A mobile-based attribute aggregation architecture for user-centric identity management

Abstract

The massive growth of the Internet and its services is currently being sustained by the mercantilization of users' identities and private data. Traditional services on the Web require the user to disclose many unnecessary sensitive identity attributes like bankcards, geographic position, or even personal health records in order to provide a service. In essence, the services are presented as free and constitute a means by which the user is mercantilized, often without realizing the real value of its data to the market. In this chapter the auhors describe OFELIA (Open Federated Environment for Leveraging of Identity and Authorization), a digital identity architecture designed from the ground up to be user centric. OFELIA is an identity/authorization versatile infrastructure that does not depend upon the massive aggregation of users' identity attributes to offer a highly versatile set of identity services but relies instead on having those attributes distributed among and protected by several otherwise unrelated Attribute Authorities. Only the end user, with his smartphone, knows how to aggregate these scattered Attribute Authorities' identity attributes back into some useful identifiable and authenticated entity identity that can then be used by Internet services in a secure and interoperable way.