Introduction

Today many services exist on the Internet that require some form of user identification or user information, e.g. for personalisation or e-commerce purposes. These services rely on customer information to improve their quality by using previously acquired knowledge about users stored in user profiles. However each of these services implements its own mechanism for that purpose, wich leads to user information redundancy, fragmentation and possible inconsistency. Moreover the current situation forces users to maintain multiple profiles at multiple service providers. This overload of personal, possibly privacy-sensitive, information floating around the Internet leads to great issues of trust.

IDsec presents a generic mechanism for establishing Virtual Identities on the Internet, that standardises protocols and interfaces for exchanging identity information between users and service providers in a secure manner. It enables users to reuse profile information across Internet services and service providers to delegate (part of) their customer information maintenance.

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