User Centric Identity Management

Identity management is traditionally seen from the service providers’ point of view, meaning that it is an activity undertaken by the service provider to manage service user identities. Traditional identity management systems are designed to be cost effective and scalable primarily for the service providers, but not necessarily for the users, which often results in poor usability. Users are, for example, often required to memorise multiple passwords for accessing different services. This represents a minor inconvenience if users only access a few online services. However, with the rapid increase in the uptake of online services, the traditional approach to identity management is already having serious negative effects on the user experience. The industry has responded by proposing new identity management models to improve the user experience, but in our view these proposals give little relief to users at the cost of relatively high increase in server system complexity. This paper takes a new look at identity management, and proposes solutions that are designed to be cost effective and scalable from the users’ perspective, while at the same time being compatible with traditional identity management systems.