Identity Management for e-Government Services

Identity management systems play a critical role in the field of e-Government and e-Business, as they constitute the basic building blocks enabling secure and reliable access to online services. In this chapter, we highlight the main technical and organizational pitfalls of current approaches to identity management which are either based on a centralized architecture or require adoption of common (technological and organizational) standards. We believe that these limitations can only be overcome by designing a common infrastructure which provides applications with transparent access to identity management services, independently of the underlying identity technology. Moreover, we describe the bridging backbone, an interoperability architecture based on a federation of national infrastructures which follows a cooperation-based approach and is fully compatible with and respectful of organizational and technical choices of existing systems.