EEMA e-Identity: Presentation on the Future of the Identity in the Cloud

I recently attended the EEMA e-Identity Conference, in London, 25-26 June 2009. There have been interesting presentation and good talks.

I also gave a presentation on “The Future of Identity in the Cloud: Requirements, Risks and Opportunities”:

“This presentation aims at: setting the context about Identity in the Cloud; discussing related identity management issues along with core requirements (coming from users and organisations); illustrating, from an HP Labs’ perspective, future possible models, approaches and IT infrastructures to handle Identity in the Cloud.
The introduction of the presentation sets some background: it gives an overview of Cloud Computing and its implications, in terms of service provisioning, security, privacy and identity management. In particular it discusses the paradigm shift from a close & controlled approach (within enterprises) to potentially, on-the-fly composable and customisable services, in the Cloud.
Use cases are introduced to illustrate “common” usage and management tasks involving Identity in the Cloud - from both user and organisational perspectives, including the implications of having to deal with Identity in composable and dynamic services. New emerging, related threats and risks are briefly discussed, such as the potential growth of bogus service providers, targeted attacks to the weakest points in the service provisioning chain and identity thefts.
This will lead to a discussion of key requirements, determined by new interaction models and service-provisioning paradigms in the Cloud, including: control of identity flows and management of distributed user accounts; trust and reputation about service providers in the Cloud; identity assurance; transparency about security practices; privacy (including consent and revocation).
I will then discuss current (categories of) identity management solutions and approaches that deal with aspects of Identity in the Cloud (such as identity federation, identity brokering, Identity 2.0, etc.), along with their pros and cons and failures to address some of the core requirements (such as assurance, trust and privacy control).
The final part of this presentation challenges current assumptions and approaches and illustrates future directions, by presenting HP Labs’ medium and long–term vision about how the underlying Cloud infrastructure is going to evolve along with its implication in terms of Identity and Identity Management. This includes the paradigm shifts introduced by the usage of trusted virtualisation, remote attestation of platform capabilities (Trusted Computing Platforms) and identity-driven computational environment (coming from the cloud) that could run on local systems (e.g. at the user side); new emerging identity management models driven by identity-aware platforms and policy-driven delegation of credentials; the role that Security and Identity Analytics can play, by using modelling and simulation, to help organisations to evaluating and predicting the consequences of using services in the Cloud, based on assumptions made on the underlying identity management model and existing threats.”

--- Posted by Marco Casassa Mont (here and here) ---

--- NOTE: my original HP blog can be found here ---