Proposal for a Common Identity Framework

Today I am posting a new paper called, Proposal for a Common Identity Framework: A User-Centric Identity Metasystem.

Good news: it doesn’t propose a new protocol!

Instead, it attempts to crisply articulate the requirements in creating a privacy-protecting identity layer for the Internet, and sets out a formal model for such a layer, defined through the set of services the layer must provide.

The paper is the outcome of a year-long collaboration between Dr. Kai Rannenberg, Dr. Reinhard Posch and myself. We were introduced by Dr. Jacques Bus, Head of Unit Trust and Security in ICT Research at the European Commission.

Each of us brought our different cultures, concerns, backgrounds and experiences to the project and we occasionally struggled to understand how our different slices of reality fit together. But it was in those very areas that we ended up with some of the most interesting results.

Kai holds the T-Mobile Chair for Mobile Business and Multilateral Security at Goethe University Frankfurt. He coordinates the EU research projects FIDIS  (Future of Identity in the Information Society), a multidisciplinary endeavor of 24 leading institutions from research, government, and industry, and PICOS (Privacy and Identity Management for Community Services).  He also is Convener of the ISO/IEC Identity Management and Privacy Technology working group (JTC 1/SC 27/WG 5)  and Chair of the IFIP Technical Committee 11 “Security and Privacy Protection in Information Processing Systems”.

Reinhard taught Information Technology at Graz University beginning in the mid 1970’s, and was Scientific Director of the Austrian Secure Information Technology Center starting in 1999. He has been federal CIO for the Austrian government since 2001, and was elected chair of the management board of ENISA (The European Network and Information Security Agency) in 2007. 

I invite you to look at our paper.  It aims at combining the ideas set out in the Laws of Identity and related papers, extended discussions and blog posts from the open identity community, the formal principles of Information Protection that have evolved in Europe, research on Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs), outputs from key working groups and academic conferences, and deep experience with EU government digital identity initiatives.

Our work is included in The Future of Identity in the Information Society – a report on research carried out in a number of different EU states on topics like the identification of citizens, ID cards, and Virtual Identities, with an accent on privacy, mobility, interoperability, profiling, forensics, and identity related crime.

I’ll be taking up the ideas in our paper in a number of blog posts going forward. My hope is that readers will find the model useful in advancing the way they think about the architecture of their identity systems.  I’ll be extremely interested in feedback, as will Reinhard and Kai, who I hope will feel free to join into the conversation as voices independent from my own.

Published by

Kim Cameron

Work on identity.