Federated identity-management protocols

  • Authors:
  • Birgit Pfitzmann;Michael Waidner

  • Affiliations:
  • IBM Zurich Research Lab;IBM Zurich Research Lab

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 11th international conference on Security Protocols
  • Year:
  • 2003

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Abstract

For authentication, one answer to the workshop question “where have all the protocols gone?” is “into federated identity management”. At least this is what many influential industrial players are currently striving for. The best-known examples are Microsoft Passport, the Liberty Alliance's proposals, and WS-Federation. While there have been many political discussions about Passport, in particular its privacy, and some technical studies of operational risks, there is almost no public literature about the actual protocols and their security. We start with an overview of the driving factors in this space, the security properties desirable and achievable under the given design constraints, and the protocols proposed so far. We present a new protocol, BBAE, with better privacy and scalability, i.e., absence of single points of control, than prior proposals. We also discuss particular difficulties of rigorously treating a protocol that can be a profile in current standardization efforts.