Active Digital Credentials: Provision of Up-to-Date Identity and Profile Information

Casassa Mont, Marco ; Brown, Richard

HP Development Company

关键词: digital credentials;    up-to-date content;    identity management;    trust;    e-commerce;   

RP-ID  :  HPL-2002-59

学科分类：计算机科学（综合）

美国|英语

来源: HP Labs

【 摘 要 】

Identities and profiles are important to enable e- commerce transactions both in well-established business relationships and sporadic business interactions. Recent initiatives, like Microsoft MyServices and Liberty Alliance Project, aim at the provision of identity and profile management solutions along with mechanisms to simplify users' experience. To be really successful, these solutions must be trusted and accountable. Current PKI solutions can be used to deal with certification and trust management: digital credentials are a viable way to certify identities and profiles. Unfortunately the complexity of managing credential lifecycle is one of the obstacles to their adoption. This complexity is accentuated in the case of dynamic environments, where the certified information is subject to frequent changes. In this paper we address the problem of providing up-to-date certified information in dynamic contexts without the burden of heavy management processes. We introduce and discuss the concept of active digital credential, based on a novel mechanism to provide up-to-date certified identity and profile information along with a fine-grained assessment of their current level of trustworthiness and validity. 15 Pages