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You Are Who You Know - Leveraging Webs-of-trust for Authentication in Identity Federations

Authors:
Bob Hulsebosch
Arnout Van Velzen
Maarten Wegdam
Martijn Oostdijk
Remco Poortinga-van Wijnen
Joost Van Dijk

Keywords: authentication; web-of-trust; level of assurance; attestation service; identity proofing

Abstract:
Digital identity assurance emerges from two aspects: the strength of the authentication solution, or how you identify yourself towards an online service, and quality of the identity proofing and registration process, or how the authentication solution was issued to you. A reliable registration process, however, is often expensive. For example, it may require the establishment of a registration desk, which is not very user friendly as it demands much effort on the part of the user. This paper investigates the feasibility of using webs-of-trust for reliable identity proofing in digital authentication. Webs-of-trust entail communities of people that trust each other, i.e. utilizing social contacts to confirm people’s identities. A functional decomposition of an attestation service and protocol for web-of-trust enhanced authentication are provided. A prototype for an attestation service was developed as a proof-of-concept, leveraging LinkedIn as a web-of-trust, and evaluated by users. Finally, characteristics of using web-of-trust for authentication assurance are discussed and a Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT) analysis was conducted. Key findings are that while webs-of-trust provide an interesting alternative mechanism for identity proofing that may have merit in use cases where no more efficient registration processes are available, its implementation is complex and mainly challenged by usability.

Pages: 176 to 184

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2015

Publication date: August 23, 2015

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2162-2116

ISBN: 978-1-61208-427-5

Location: Venice, Italy

Dates: from August 23, 2015 to August 28, 2015