A Roadmap for Personal Identity Management

Digital identities and secure environments are a fundamental precondition for giving life to e-government, e-health, and e-commerce. Whereas corporations are spending huge amounts on harmonizing identity management, and still fail, the average customer/citizen is left alone drowning in dozens of digital identities. This paper presents a roadmap for personal identity management. It highlights shortcomings of existing solutions, identifies major research challenges and gives an overview of steps that are necessary on the way towards an efficient solution for personal identity management. The benefits of increased usability and manageability are juxtaposed with privacy issues that potentially occur when a considerable quantity of functionality is concentrated in one single device.