Identity management directions in future internet

The future Internet architecture, aiming at the unification of diverse network technologies, must deal with a series of fundamental issues. This article addresses a specific aspect of the identity management issue: the diversity of user identities and identity related user data exchanged among users and services. Existing research efforts propose solutions applicable only within specific service contexts or administrative domains. Any efforts for interoperation and convergence among them require laborious adaptation of their internal mechanisms and protocol formats with the presence of a global ID as a prerequisite. This article proposes a new distributed architecture called Dynamic Identity Mapping, Association N' Discovery System (DIMANDS) that discovers and creates trusted and secure associations among a user's identity related data that reside in various network locations and contexts.