Study on Mobile Identity Management INTRODUCTION

Introduction

Scope

Every person has his own identity. This identity consists of person’s roles, e.g. while using government services a person is well known whereas while he is shopping, only some personal attributes of him are needed. These different kinds of identity are represented by partial identities. A partial identity is a set of personal attributes of a user whereas a user can have several partial identities. Close to the physical world, a user changes his partial identity in computer networks while thereby varying between being anonymous and identifiable. Such a change depends on the situation. By this means, a user protects his privacy and at the same time is able to build up a reputation towards his communication partner with respect to his current partial identity. 

A mobile user has several mobile devices such as mobile phones, smart cards or RFID (Radio Frequency ID). As mobile devices have fixed identifiers, they are essentially providing a mobile identity. Mobile identity takes into account location data of mobile users in addition to their personal data. Mobile identity management empowers mobile users to manage their mobile identities to enforce their security and privacy interests. Mobile identity management is a special kind of identity management. For this purpose, mobile users must be able to control the disclosure of their mobile identity dependent on the respective service provider and also their location via mobile identity management systems. This study focuses on this kind of mobile identity management: user-controlled mobile identity management.

The objective of this study is to give the non-technical as well as the technical reader a comprehensible, technical survey on mobile identity management, focusing in particular on security and privacy interests of mobile users. The study examines the need for mobile identity management by analysing scenarios and referring to literature. Requirements for mobile identity management systems are derived from exemplary scenarios. Privacy threats for mobile users and the usability of mobile identity management systems are both taken into account. Approaches for mobile identity management systems present the realisation of some requirements. A complete survey on the technical implementations of mechanisms meeting the described requirements and existing identity management systems (including mobile identity management systems) will be given in the FIDIS study on a “structured overview on prototypes and concepts of identity management systems” (D 3.1) and the “database on ID laws and identity management systems in the EU” (D 8.3). This study will end by drawing conclusions with an outlook to further research on mobile identity management.