The Need for Privacy-Enhancing Identity Management

Introduction

The previous chapter described current developments in identity management. Identity management systems are moving away from enterprise centric ‘silo’ systems towards federated and user-centric systems. The traditional single enterprise solutions with their identity data ‘silo’s’ are becoming obsolete because of the collaboration between service providers and because they are burdensome for both the individual and for organisations. Current developments towards single sign on and identity federation do acknowledge the complaints about the inconvenience of traditional identity management systems. They do, however, still mainly focus on the enterprise identity management needs: access control to resources. On the forefront of IdM developments we observe projects where the individual is increasingly placed center stage rather than enterprises.