User centric authentication for web applications

Due to its large penetration and ease of use, the web environment provides a platform that enables collaboration among people working on a joint topic. Regardless of the actual focus of collaborating groups, security is very often a key aspect of such an environment. Provision of the proper level of authentication and access control is a necessity in almost any real world deployment of collaborative tools. The growing number of collaborating people also increases the overheads of the management of the users and their identities, especially when people from multiple institutions are involved. Current approaches to address these issues try to make use of the federated identity management, which makes it possible to utilize the existing identity management systems and to link them with the service providers. However promising the federated models are, they also show some drawbacks that render the systems less usable than intended. In this paper we provide a summary of the weaknesses and, following that, we introduce another model that places the user as the main part of the infrastructure. The architecture moves the management of users' attributes closely to their owner and provides a scalable infrastructure enabling a dynamic trust establishment.