User-centric Identity Management in Ambient Environments

Context-aware intelligent systems in ambient environments will have major impact in the near future to the way people will perceive and deal with computer technologies regarding privacy, security and trust. In those environments it will be all about personalized information and digital identities – so the foremost goal we are heading for in our research is: How to avoid omni-persistence in a world of omni-presence? Firstly, we show in this paper how any kind of personalized information, such as identities, preferences and profiles, will fuel those systems to support, serve and simplify people’s lives. Secondly, we are convinced that especially privacy and so-called informational self determination are at stake if protection goals like confidentiality, transparency, and minimal disclose of information are not well balanced and precisely taken into account when realizing such systems. Existing standards, solutions and technologies in Identity Management are specifically tailored for example for the Internet, company processes or eGovernment. However, for future ambient environments they have to be improved and revised to meet also user-centric requirements. This paper combines certain aspects of existing approaches to introduce a new middleware architecture that supports user-centric Identity Management. We further show that this middleware enables future application developers to meet (almost) all of our postulated ten laws of identity.