Modular reference framework architecture for Identity Management

Interoperable Identity Management systems are prerequisite for novel user-centric services, which strongly rely on user identity attributes and security services. Future Identity Management systems will enable dynamic and automatic exchange of user identity attributes between services from different key-business areas, e.g. Internet, healthcare, e-government, e-banking, entertainment, etc. Moreover, they will allow federating different user identities so that any of them will be sufficient to dynamically bootstrap trust relation between the user and any service. For this to happen, Identity Management systems need to include capabilities for dynamic and automatic ad-hoc interworking. This paper is a step towards this approach. It proposes a modular reference framework architecture for Identity Management systems and it introduces Identity Management Layers. The value of the proposed architecture is in its generic yet complete approach, in modularity and in layered structure which allows covering isolated, centralized, federated and personal authentication management schemes.