User-Centric Identity, Trust and Privacy

This chapter introduces entification as a means of allowing the users of e-services to create and manage multiple pseudonyms in a decentralized way; thereby limiting the ability to link transactions and users, whilst mitigating attacks due to the ownership of multiple identities. The entification framework fills the gap between the identity and the computational trust/reputation layers. It is difficult to safely assess linked evidence about multiple virtual identities because there might be overcounting of overlapping trust pieces of evidence. The entification framework uses a new mechanism, called trust transfer, to mitigate this issue, and allows the users to trade privacy for trust. Such a framework is essential in a world where more and more e-services want to rely on user-centric identity management.