Identity management mismatch challenges in the Danish municipality administration system

  • Authors:
  • Mads Schaarup Andersen;Henrik Bærbak Christensen

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Computer Science, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark;Department of Computer Science, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark

  • Venue:
  • ECSA'10 Proceedings of the 4th European conference on Software architecture
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

Integrating a COTS product in a company's product portfolio is appealing from a business perspective but highly challenging from the perspective of the software architecture. In this paper we outline research challenges regarding authorization in the identity management part of the Danish municipality administration system, called Opus BRS, a system that integrates SAP, legacy mainframe systems, and other systems present in the individual municipalities. Each of these systems defines their own access control model and architecture, which leads to architectural mismatch that impacts security, usability, as well as maintainability. We outline a three-year research project and discuss our research method that will include elements of action research as well as experiments using architectural prototyping. The project is carried out in cooperation with KMD, one of the largest Danish IT companies, who is the producer of the Opus system.