A User-Centric Model for Supporting Web Services

The wide deployment of Web services in wire line and wireless networks has resulted in the proliferation of user identities relying on which the trust between a user and a Web service can be established through identification and authentication. Since user identities normally contain some information concerned with user privacy, sharing of such identity information between Web services should be minimized to preserve user privacy. In this paper, we propose a user-centric trust model for supporting Web services based on the principle of least sharing identity information. This model can be applied to applications in which a user is interacting with multiple Web services simultaneously. We describe this model and show how it can be used as the foundation for developing comprehensive solutions to protect user identities during Web service interactions, thus preserving user privacy.