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Architektur und Werkzeuge für dynamisches Identitätsmanagement in Föderationen

. Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, (November 2016)

Abstract

Federated Identity Management (FIM) has the motivation to provide identity data of users from their home organisation, also called Identity Provider (IdP), to a Service Provider (SP). This facilitates the prevention of redundancy and inconsistency, while users can re-use their home account for other services, without remembering further user accounts and passwords. The Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) and the protocol OpenID Connect are two well-known standards within the industry sector and research & education (R&E) environment. Due to the ongoing interconnectedness, the limitations of the current architecture are increasingly revealed. In the first part of the thesis, a profound and comprehensive analysis is presented, in order to illustrate different perspectives on the architecture and the requirements. The focus of the more than seventy structured and weighted requirements in the categories function, non-functional, organizational as well as privacy- and security-specific categories lays in the automation and scalability of the approach as well as trust implications and interoperability. As part of the holistic, integrated architecture conceived in this thesis, a management platform for dynamic FIM has been developed. Besides the precise specification of the orchestrated, technical metadata exchange, special emphasis has been put on the organizational integration concerning the IT service management. Dependencies and effects on the security management and change management have been investigated in detail. To compensate further shortcomings of existing approaches, two new FIM components have been specified, which enhance the interoperability between FIM systems in heterogeneous identity federations, as well as the scalability and automation of existing workflows. The thesis is concluded with a description of the prototypical implementation of the management platform and the tool concepts as well as a discussion on their scalability characteristics and the application of the architecture to a realistic scenario.

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