Requirements Analysis for Identity Management in Ambient Environments: The HYDRA Approach

The research field of Ambient Environments and Ubiquitous Computing aims toward the future vision of intelligent mobile and wireless network scenarios. In such environments where the wireless network consists of numerous nodes, like intelligent devices, sensors and mobile devices, a highly secured and well defined Identity (ID) Management System is required that deals with issues like virtual and temporary identities of users and devices as well as users’ awareness in information disclosure and privacy. One major goal of the EU-project HYDRA1 (“Networked Embedded System middleware for heterogeneous physical devices in a distributed architecture”) is the support of developers of such ambient environments to manage context sensitive identity information and assure integration and interoperability of existing ID Management approaches. Based on this project in this paper we identify and analyze ten requirements for a middleware architecture to create a bridge between existing identity management technologies and also allow a framework to make them available for application developers of ambient environments.