Controlled sharing of identity attributes for better privacy

Abstract

In recent years user centricity has drawn a lot of attention as a promising component to advance federated identity management (FIM) systems. The basic notion is to give users a larger degree of control over their attribute data that comprises digital identities on a federated network, thus providing an ideal mechanism for upholding user privacy. One of the fundamental problems facing user centricity in this context is how a user can selectively share her identity attributes certified by an identity provider (IdP) to a service provider (SP). In this paper we present an approach to addressing the problem, which allows a user to share only selected attributes from a larger set of attributes that form his digital identity credential for better privacy. Our approach enables such sharing to occur without IdPpsilas intervention in every transaction.