Establishing Persistent Identity using the Handle System

In this paper, we propose that identity reference used over distributed communication should be defined independent from any attributes and/or the public keys associated with the underlying subject. This allows the identity reference to be persistent over changes made to the attributes and/or the public keys. We further suggest to separate the trust establishment over distributed communication into three categories: the transport trustworthy, the administrative trustworthy, and the content credential, which we believe will simplify trust and trust management. These lead to our proposal to use handles registered under the Handle System [1] as persistent identity reference for Internet communication, and utilize the handle system security service to help trust management over the Internet.