Proven and Modern Approaches to Identity Management

People around the world stay in contact with their families, friends, and colleagues by exchanging text and multimedia data online. This would not be possible without digital identities, which in turn necessitates Identity and Access Management (I&AM). Each natural person, legal entity, and device can have several digital identities with different associated information, such as the credentials used for authentication. During the past 15 years, Federated Identity Management (FIM) has gained traction as it enables the use of one organization’s identities to access other organizations’ services, e.g. in business-to-business cooperation. It turned out to be a double-edged sword, as it improves the user experience and reduces the attack vector of password reuse on the one hand, but it comes with data quality issues and a larger impact of compromised accounts on the other hand. More recently, the privacy-by-design approach of user-centric identity management, which puts each user in full control over its digital identity data, finds a new home in Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) management based on distributed ledger technology, also known as blockchain. This chapter gives an insight into the exciting world of digital human identities, time-tested as well as recent approaches to their professional management from a security perspective, and discusses closely related governance and compliance topics such as data protection and levels of assurance.