Providing identity based on the telephone number: a new business model for telecommunication operators

Managing user identities to solve authentication and access control for current services and applications remains one of the greatest challenges facing IT today. Using telecommunication operators' infrastructures and experience could surely facilitate identity management in such a scenario, because they hold the best and largest user directory of the world. Telephone numbers allow operators to provide rich and disambiguated identities ready to be used by end-­‐users from anywhere with any device. This work proposes an Identity Management as a Service (IdMaaS) based on the telephone number and provided by telecommunication operators. Both, the technical architecture and the most suitable business model needed to build and to exploit this new service are presented.