Managing identities in cloud computing environments

As cloud computing becomes a hot spot of research, the security issues of clouds raise concerns and attention from academic research community. A key area of cloud security is managing users’ identities, which is fundamental and important to other aspects of cloud computing. A number of identity management frameworks and systems are introduced and analysed. Issues remaining in them are discussed and potential solutions and countermeasures are proposed

Governance Models for Interoperable Electronic Identities

Current implementations of electronic identity in Europe are rather diverse; they include state-driven identity management frameworks as well as private sector frameworks and different forms of public-private collaborations. This diversity may represent a major challenge for the deployment of information society services addressed towards the European internal market. This raises the question: How can we achieve interoperability of electronic identities across Europe, and potentially beyond Europe’s borders? This paper argues that the interoperability of electronic identity could be governed by a multi-stakeholder governance framework that brings together different parties with interests in the provision and use of electronic identities. Such a governance framework could, for example, consist in designing and operating a portal with common functionalities that allows interoperable authentication across multiple domains and contexts. Inspiration for the governance of such a portal could come both from existing successful implementations of electronic identity and from multi-stakeholder institutions that have proven useful in Internet governance.

Improving privacy in identity management systems for health care scenarios

Privacy is a very complex and subjective concept with different meaning to different people. The meaning depends on the context. Moreover, privacy is close to the user information and thus, present in any ubiquitous computing scenario. In the context of identity management (IdM), privacy is gaining more importance since IdM systems deal with services that requires sharing attributes belonging to users’ identity with different entities across domains. Consequently, privacy is a fundamental aspect to be addressed by IdM to protect the exchange of user attributes between services and identity providers across different networks and security domains in pervasive computing. However, problems such as the effective revocation consent, have not been fully addressed. Furthermore, privacy depends heavily on users and applications requiring some degree of flexibility. This paper analyzes the main current identity models, as well as the privacy support presented by the identity management frameworks. After the main limitations are identified, we propose a delegation protocol for the SAML standard in order to enhance the revocation consent within healthcare scenarios.Proyecto CCG10-UC3M/TIC-4992 de la Comunidad Autónoma de Madrid y la Universidad Carlos III de Madri

An identity aware wimax personalization for pervasive computing services

Mobile Internet access is becoming more and more pervasive in the new 4G scenarios, where WiMAX is to play a crucial role. WiMax has advantages when considering both energy consumption and bandwidth, when compared with HSDPA and LTE. However, we have found some limitations in IEEE 802.16 security support, which may limit authentication and authorization mechanisms for ubiquitous service development. In this article we analyze weaknesses and vulnerabilities we have found in WiMAX security. WiMax, with the adequate identity management support, could be invaluable for developing new pervasive computing services. We propose the introduction of identity management in WiMAX, as a pervious step to the definition of identity aware WiMax personalization of pervasive computing servicesProyecto CCG10-UC3M/TIC-4992 de la Comunidad Autónoma de Madrid y la Universidad Carlos III de Madri

Secured Web Services Specifications

The proliferation of XML based web services in the IT industry not only gives rise to opportunities but challenges too. Namely the challenges of security and a standard way of maintaining it across domains and organisational boundaries. OASIS, W3C and other organisations have done some great work in bringing about this synergy. What I look in this paper are some of the more popular standards in vogue today and clubbed under WS-* specification. I will try to give an overview of various frameworks and protocols being used to keep webservices secure. Some of the major protocols looked into are WS-Security, SAML, WS-Federation, WS-Trust, XMLEncryption and Signature. This paper will give you a brief introduction to impact of using WS-* on time complexity due to the extra load of encrypting and certificates. Windows communication foundation (WCF) is one of the best designed toolset for this though WCF is not the topic of discussion in this paper

Using Adaptive Enterprise Architecture Framework for Defining the Adaptable Identity Ecosystem Architecture

Digital identity management is often used to handle fraud detection and hence reduce identity thefts. However, using digital identity management presents additional challenges in terms of privacy of the identity owner meanwhile managing the security of the verification. In this paper, drawing on adaptive enterprise architecture (EA) with an ecosystem approach to digital identity, we describe an identity ecosystem (IdE) architecture to handle identity management (IdM) while safeguarding security and privacy. This study is a part of the larger action design research project with our industry partner DZ. We have used adaptive EA as a theoretical lens to define a privacy aware adaptive IdM with a view to improve the Id operations and delivery of services in the public and private sector. The value of the anticipated architecture is in its generic yet comprehensive structure, component orientation and layered approach which aim to enable the contemporary IdM