Privacy-Enhancing Identity Management

Abstract

Privacy-Enhancing Technologies (PET) are the technical answer to social and legal privacy requirements. PET become constituents for tools to manage users' personal data. Users can thereby control their individual digital identity, i.e. their individual partial identities in an online world. Existing commercially available identity management systems (IMS) do not yet provide privacy-enhancing functionality. We discuss general concepts and mechanisms for privacy-enhancing IMS (PE-IMS) in detail and highlight where existing IMS need to be improved in order to deliver them. Derived from general concepts and incorporating existing mechanisms, we define a component-based architecture for PE-IMS. This architecture describes the basic building blocks a PE-IMS must include, and so it is meant to be used as a fundamental concept for PE-IMS in practice. Finally, we give an outlook on the future development concerning IMS.