Distributed identity discovery service for non-federated systems

Today, multiple digital identities of a person are managed by independent identity providers. These identities are unlinked with each other, therefore existing identity discovery mechanisms are restricted to discovery by way of a known identifier, within a certain identifier domain or federation of identifier domains. In the future, automatic service personalization will make extensive use of identity attributes. Therefore, next-generation Identity Management systems will have to include a discovery framework for automatic exchange of identity attributes not only within federations, but also between the non-federated domains, such as the Internet, healthcare, e-government, e-banking and entertainment. The future identity discovery framework should allow to link different identities of a person, so that any of them would be sufficient to bootstrap trust relation between the attribute provider and the service provider. This paper proposes an interoperable distributed identity discovery service which alleviates the above limitations and allows for cross-domain discovery of identities in different and non-federated identifier domains. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first proposition of a cross-federation discovery service for unlinked identities of the person.