Supports for identity management in ambient environments - The Hydra approach-

Context-aware intelligent homes, body area networks in healthcare as well as holistic and sustainable agriculture are prominent scenarios in the scope of the research field Ambient Environments and Ubiquitous Computing. Such environments where mobile and wireless networks consist of numerous nodes, like sensors, intelligent gateways and mobile devices, require a highly secured and well defined Identity Management framework. Such a framework has to deal with the complete life cycle of identities of users, services and devices as well as users' awareness in information disclosure and privacy. The Identity Management Framework introduced in this paper aims at enabling developers of ambient environments to provide identity management mechanisms according to their specific service scenarios transparent of the underlying standards and security details. From the core requirements analysed in the EU-Project Hydra 1, the need for an autonomous identity management module is evide nt. Based on an evaluation of existing Identity Management Systems the paper, therefore, introduces an identity management framework that meets those requirements and will be integrated into the Hydra middleware