The Chronicler's Web (TCW)

by Dan Calloway, MSIT
Published August 8, 2009 at 7:15pm; www.dancalloway.com

There is much skepticism surrounding cryptography. Fagin et al. (2008) indicates that there is progress being made in this area to remove the skepticism. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has joined forces with the National Security Agency (NSA) to form the “Common Criteria” process known as the Common Criteria for Information Technology Security Evaluation 2005 whose aim it is to increase the confidence in cryptographic and information-related security products. Additionally, the Department of Defense (DoD) has enacted policy directives requiring Information Assurance (IA) professionals to receive information security training in addition to basic IA training for all of its DoD employees (Fagin et al.). Fagin et al. further notes that security today requires some level of skepticism and critical thinking.

Bhargav-Spantzel et al. (2007) contends that there is a recent paradigm in identify management called user-centricity identity management. The study conducted by Bhargav-Spantzel et al. differentiated between two predominant notions: relationship-focused and credential-focused identity management. In the former approach, a user only maintains relationships with identity providers (IDPs) and thus every transaction providing identity information is conveyed to the appropriate IDP. In the latter approach, the user must obtain long-term credentials and store them in a local provider database.

Bhargav-Spantzel et al. indicates that the most predominant identity management model on the Internet today is the silo model where users handle their own data and provide it to organizations separately. One solution to this dilemma offered by Bhargav-Spantzel et al. is the centralized federation model, such as Microsoft’s Passport, which removes the inconsistencies and redundancies of the silo model and provides the Web users a seamless experience. Bhargav-Spantzel et al. offers a taxonomy for unifying the relationship-focused and credential-focused identity management, and investigated the idea of a universal user-centric system, which incorporates the current approaches. The open research question offered by Bhargav-Spantzel et al. in their study is the search for a credential-based user-centric system that crosses the boundaries of user-centricity. The study also supports their approach in unifying the notions in user-centricity that could be useful in the field of user-centric federated identity management systems (FIMS). (more…)