Evaluating identity management architectures

Abstract

Developments in the area of identity management have been subject to very little critique. Many implementations have gathered little general following, and larger scale adoption, such as OpenID, has been limited to internal systems and large identity providers. Previous evaluation has focussed on specific areas and does little to describe the trade off performed in the use of new identity management architectures. Furthermore, these evaluations have not equally considered user vs service provider perspective. This paper looks to derive a method for evaluation which encapsulates metrics from past work and areas which have not been considered. This method produces a holistic evaluation and comparison of identity management architectures.