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Global identity management in the Internet of Things

In the Internet of Things (IoT), objects are seamlessly interconnected by anyone, anywhere, and anytime on behalf of user(s) as an effective actor (EA) for the communication. An actor in the IoT is any identified entity, which needs to be interacting with other entities using the Internet technologies. The service providers (SPs) need to truly establish the EA identity behind the communicated object(s) to offer him/her the right service, which is the vision of the IoT. Theoretically, actors could have different identity attributes and identifiers that are managed by different Identity Management systems (IdMs) in every domain they interact with. These IdMs are not always interoperable with each other because they often use different identity attributes and identification systems, which causes that identities are unrecognized across their IdM domains. This can have an impact on the SPs ability to establish the EA identity across their domain, which is a key to realize the IoT. Moreover, the communicated objects identities are widely used as an alternative or secondary identity for their users based on fixed relationship between the user and their devices that can also be used to identify their EAs identities. However, the actor relationships are not always fixed in the IoT; they can be changed or even revoked. This make identifying the actual requester (EA) identity in the IoT a challenge task facing the SPs. Hence, it is important to consider them when identifying the EA of the communicated object in the IoT. This research addresses the SPs difficulty to truly establish the EA identity behind the communicated objects to offer the right services in the IoT environment. This research proposes a new identification technique to facilitate the establishment of the actual requester’s (i.e. the EA) identity behind the communicated object by the SPs in the IoT. This technique requires the existence of four identity parameters for the interacted actors, which are the actor type, Internet connectivity, identifier, and the identity provider (IdP) identifier. Moreover, the actor relationship type between the EA and the communication object(s) that are used to request services or data in the IoT environment has been determined. Thus, a new semantic identifier called a global actor relationship identifier (GARI) is formulated to represent the actors identity that are participating in a relationship and the actor relationship type between them. Furthermore, to solve the IdMs interoperability across-domain, a global identity management system (GIdM) is proposed to consolidate the IdMs in the IoT environment by using distributed trusted third parties. GIdM includes the design of a new protocol called a global identity verification protocol (GIdV). GIdV facilitates the establishment of a dynamic trust relationship and the validation of the EA identity based on the relationship type and a set of identity attributes. To prove the concept, a testing environment has been built to mimic requesting services or data across-domain in the IoT environment. The simulation testing proves the effectiveness of the developed solutions (GARI and the GIdM system) to establish the EA identity in the IoT environment using the basics scenarios of interaction. Moreover, the comparison with the state of the art identifiers in the IoT shows that the GARI is the only one that presents the interacted actors identity parameters along with their relationship(s) type to use in the IoT environment. Therefore, the GIdM with the GARI is the most suitable IdM that supports the SPs to establish a required trust relationship and verify the EA identity across-domain in the IoT environment based on the actor identity attributes and the relationship(s) type in the IoT environment.