On the Horizon

56 COPUBLISHED BY THE IEEE COMPUTER AND RELIABILITY SOCIETIES ■ 1540-7993/09/$26.00 © 2009 IEEE ■ SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2009 Moreover, these online identity systems could provide greater protections for security and privacy than we currently achieve when using documents to prove identity in the physical world. As I mentioned earlier, online identity management systems are important if we’re to address the Internet’s growing crime problem. The range of criminal activity that the Internet supports is broad, including consumer threats (such as compromised computers being used for unauthorized activities, identity theft, financial fraud, and child endangerment), enterprise threats (such as the theft of financial information, loss of personally identifiable information, economic espionage, and extortion via threats of denialof-service attacks), and government threats (such as information warfare). These crimes are pervasive in part because the Internet has four attributes that make it attractive to criminals: global connectivity, anonymity, a lack of traceability, and valuable targets. Without proactive controls (such as neighborhood watches and police patrols) and absent reactive effectiveness (due to anonymity and lack of traceability), those who commit crimes on the Internet have little concern about identification and capture and, therefore, little to deter them. This is one reason why identity management is so important. Not surprisingly, however, mentioning the words “identity” and “the Internet” in the same sentence gives many people pause, in large part because the Internet necessary because, to reduce online crime, we must significantly improve how we authenticate ourselves on various computer systems.