Active Digital Credentials: Dynamic Provision of Up-to-Date Identity Information

Identities and profiles are important to enable e-commerce transactions. Recent initiatives, like Microsoft .MyServices and Liberty Alliance Project, aim at the provision of identity and profile management solutions along with mechanisms to simplify users’ experience. These solutions must be trusted and accountable. Current PKI solutions can be used to deal with certification and trust management. Unfortunately the complexity of managing digital credential lifecycle is one of the obstacles to their adoption. This complexity is accentuated in the case of dynamic environments, where the certified information is subject to frequent changes. In this paper we address the problem of providing up-to-date certified information in dynamic contexts. We introduce the concept of active digital credential as a mechanism to provide up-to-date certified identity and profile information along with a fine-grained assessment of trustworthiness and validity. Work is in progress both to implement a prototype and assess the feasibility of the proposed model.