Digital identity

Draft

Definition

WARNING: This is really just a stub !!

• “Digital identity refers to the aspect of digital technology that is concerned with the mediation of people's experience of their own identity and the identity of other people and things.” (Wikipedia, retrieved 12:06, 12 April 2007 (MEST)).

Technical definition

• “The electronic representation of a real-world entity. The term is usually taken to mean the online equivalent of an individual human being, which participates in electronic transactions on behalf of the person in question. However a broader definition also assigns digital identities to organizations, companies and even individual electronic devices. Various complex questions of privacy, ownership and security surround the issue of digital identity.” (Loosely coupled, retrieved 12:06, 12 April 2007 (MEST)).

Issues

Authentication

• The process of attempting to verify the digital identity of the sender of a communication such as a request to log in.

Identity as "being there"

Useful features of a virtual environment for identity building

• User names on websites, some with graphical representations
• Avatars in virtual worlds (text, 2D, 3D).
• Descriptions (forms) that describe a user
• Portfolios (what a person did contribute)

Technology

Light-weight protocols and systems for identification on the Web

• MicroID - Small Decentralized Verifiable Identity.MicroID is a lightweight identity layer for the web, invented by Jeremie Miller (creator of Jabber). MicroID enables anyone to claim verifiable ownership over content hosted anywhere on the web (social networking sites, discussion forums, blogs, etc.).

• OpenID is an open, decentralized, free framework for user-centric digital identity. The first piece of the OpenID framework is authentication -- how you prove ownership of a URI. Your username is your URI, and your password (or other credentials) stays safely stored on a OpenID Provider (can be your own).

• Light-Weight Identity (LID). a set of protocols and software implementations created by Johannes Ernst of NetMesh Inc. for representing and using digital identities on the Internet in a light-weight manner, without relying on any central authority. Related to OpenID)

• Yadis Yadis is an open initiative to build an interoperable lightweight discovery protocol for decentralized, user-centric digital identity and related purposes. Yadis aims to allow the capabilities of identities to be composed from an open-ended set of services, defined and/or implemented by many different parties.

More heavy systems

• Shibboleth.an architecture and open-source implementation for federated identity-based authentication and authorization infrastructure based on SAML.
  • E.g. adopted by the Swiss University Network

• LDAP

Links

• Wikipedia Digital Identity

Some technology links

• Public-key cryptography (Wikipedia)

• OpenID (Wikipedia)

• ight-Weight Identity