Privacy- Enhanced Identity Management for E-Services

Abstract

This chapter introduces the concept of privacy-enhanced identity management for e-services supporting the users needs to protect their privacy and sensitive information. Business activities are increasingly based on the use of remote resources and e-services as well as on the interaction between different, remotely-located, parties. In this context, the electronic execution of private and/or sensitive transactions must fully preserve information privacy by managing in a trustworthy and responsible way all identity and profile information that is released to remote parties. In this chapter, we investigate the main problems concerning identity management for e-services and outline the features that the next-generation of identity management systems should provide for. State-of-the-art technology in the field of privacy-enhanced identity management systems is also compared with traditional Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) solutions. The analysis of the benefits of these modern identity management systems is presented and discussed with references also to the results of some experiences in the area of e-government, whose objective is the development of public administration privacy-aware e-services.