Usability and privacy in identity management architectures

Abstract

Digital identities represent who we are when engaging in online activities and transactions. The rapid growth in the number of online services leads to an increasing num-ber of different identities that each user needs to manage. As a result, many people feel overloaded with identities and suffer from password fatigue. This is a serious prob-lem and makes people unable properly control and pro-tect their digital identities against identity theft. This pa-per discusses usability and privacy in online identity man-agement solutions, and proposed a general approach for making users better able to control and manage their dig-ital identities, as well as for creating more secure iden-tity management solutions. More specically, we propose a user-centric approach based on hardware and software technology on the user-side with the aim of assisting users when accessing online services.