TPIM: Transparent Privacy-Enhanced Identity Management of Web Services

The growth of web services has been accompanied by sharing more and more users’ personal information with service providers, which has raised concern about possible malicious or accidental unauthorized abuse of user information. This paper focuses on how we can give the user a deep sense of safety, privacy and certainty about service invocations in the diverse and heterogeneous computing environment. We present Transparent privacy-enhanced Identity Management of Web Services (TPIM), a privacy-enhanced personal Identity Management architecture for web services users. TPIM is an extension of SOAP specification, which provides a sense of “circle of trust” in the identity management during the collaborations of web services. It enables that user’s identity or personal data to adapt to be accessible only to whom they trust. In other words, a user can put his or her personal information on any web services and maintain privacy in different user-defined security level (including up to unconditional anonymity) as well.