Digital Identity in The Absence of Authorities: A New Socio-Technical Approach Mark McLaughlin∗ Gerard Briscoe† Paul Malone∗ Abstract On the Internet large service providers tend to control the digital identities of users. These defacto identity authorities wield significant power over users, compelling them to comply with non-negotiable terms, before access to services2010 is granted. In doing so, users expose themselves to privacy risks, manipulation and Oct exploitationevital Ecosystemsvia anddirectuser-centricmarketing.identityAgainstemphasisethis backdrop,decentralisedthe emergingenvironmentsareas of withDig- independent self-detringuing entities that control their own data and identity. We 31 show that recent advances in user-centric identity, federated identity and trust have prepared the ground for decentralised identity provisioning. We show how social trust, rather than blind deference to authorities, can provide a basis for identity, where risks can be weighed and compared rather than merely accepted. Funda- mentally, we are considering the move from authority-centric centralised identity provisioning to user-centric distributed identity provisioning. Finally, we highlight[cs.CY] the potential impacts of distributed identity provisioning in the Information Society and give a brief roadmap for its general implementation and adoption. Keywords: digital identity, user-centric, federated identity, trust, decentralised 1 Introduction This paper is concerned with digital identity1 in decentralised environments, where iden- tity authorities either do not exist or play a limited role. We have two decentralised environments in mind: i) the web, where users access services on the Internet via a web browser, and ii) Digital Ecosystem platforms where users use enhanced clients to accessarXiv:1011.0192v1 web services via arbitrary service access protocols. Usually, our analysis applies equally to both cases; where this is otherwise, a distinction is made. The ethos of Digital Ecosystemsvia (DEs) favours open, distributed service platforms as an alternative to the ‘keystone’ model, in which entities cluster around systems that are owned and maintained by a small number of authoritative entities. DEs are composed of distributed, interconnected groups of equal entities, in contrast to the keystone model ∗Telecommunications Software & Systems Group, Waterford Institute of Technology, Ireland, {mmclaughlin, pmalone}@tssg.org †Department of Media and Communications, London School of Economics and Political Science, United Kingdom, g.briscoe@lse.ac.uk 1 that fosters an undesirable dependence of ‘ordinary’ entities on ‘authoritative’ entities. DEs are effective when they foster broad, diverse organisations of entities that are free to compete and collaborate based on dynamic social factors. Identity in DEs must be similarly distributed and decentralised, and founded on social relationships within the ecosystem. The virtual organisation of identities in an ecosystem can be described as emergent, decentralised, informal, and though based on local relationships is potentially global in extent. Traditionally, identity has been concerned almost solely with the use of a username-password pair to authenticate a user for access to a service. A small set of data items stored by the service provider (SP) determines the user’s access rights and other information pertinent to service use. Users, typically, have one identity per service, and the SP provides the identity, via an internal identity provider (IdP). The IdP is responsible for retaining information pertaining to this identity, providing authentication and authorisation, and generally speaking presiding over the entire life-cycle of the identity. For each service, there is a prescribed IdP that users must deal with. Where services become very popular, and where services proliferate on the same network, or service platform (e.g. Google, Yahoo!), a common IdP is invariably used to manage identities for all services. These IdPs are identity authorities for those environments and users are compelled to accept their terms of service and to trust them with supplied personal information. Recent developments in identity, driven by technical, social and business concerns have begun to change this landscape significantly. User-centric identity developments have led to the logical and functional separation of SP and IdP, which allows the user to choose the IdP that provides their identity to an SP. Federated Identity is concerned with linking identity domains intra-and interorganisation such as users in one domain can consume services in another. “Federated identity infrastructure enables cross-boundary single sign-on (SSO), dynamic user provisioning and identity attribute sharing. By providing for identity portability, identity federation affords end-users with increased simplicity and control over the movement of personal identity information while simultaneously enabling companies to extend their security perimeter to trusted partners.” (SourceID, 2009). User-centric identity is a philosophy, and set of supporting standards and technologies, for empowering the user by giving them control over their identities (Maler and Reed, 2008). The major philosophical innovation is in forming a distinction between SP and IdP in online applications, where the two have always been seamlessly integrated, and providing those SPs (e.g. Facebook, Twitter) to use an IdP of the user’s choice (rather than its own) to authenticate the user for the service. This move has given users the opportunity to manage consent for personal data disclosure, manage their own credentials, and perform authentication, or SSO (where the IdP will authenticate the user to a range of services), independently of SPs4 (e.g. OpenID5). Trust has long been a topic of study in psychology, sociology, philosophy and economics; but in the nineties it has also found application in e-commerce, particularly in online markets such as eBay (Sabater and Sierra, 2005). Trust can be described as “a directional relationship between two parties that can be called trustor and trustee,” (Jøsang, 2007) where a trustor is said to trust, or not to trust, a trustee, in a particular context. Trust transitivity describes how trust propagates on social networks, and is predicated on the principle that if A trusts B and B trusts C, indirectly trusts C under certain conditions (Huang and Fox, 2006). These trusted beliefs feed into decision making in the real world, and recently in the online worl

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