Towards a Context-Aware WebID Certificate Creation Taking Individual Conditions and Trust Needs into Account

Abstract

WebID is a new development of the W3C. As a universal identification mechanism, WebID enables users to authenticate through client certificates instead of username/password pairs. For creating such WebID certificates, there are different ways available. Each is characterized by several aspects that become important depending on a user's individual conditions and trust needs. Users must carefully consider these aspects on their own to find the most appropriate way for them. There is a risk that inexperienced users make wrong considerations, which affect their security and privacy. In this work, we propose an approach towards a context-aware WebID certificate creation taking individual conditions and trust needs into account. As a proof of concept, we apply the SWAC framework that facilitates JavaScript-based generation of WebID certificates on both client and server. We evaluate our approach and available methods including HTML5 keygen and native implementations using different devices and Web browsers.