Entity-Driven Design for Secure Identity Administration

Abstract

Access to digital services requires entities, such as users or software services, to establish their identities before interacting with service providers. Conventional identity management systems typically maintain separate identity records for each application, often resulting in multiple accounts for the same entity within a single service provider. When identical personally identifiable information and attributes are reused across platforms, these fragmented records can be correlated, increasing the risk of identity exposure and privacy breaches. This work presents an entity-centric identity management model tailored for cloud environments, designed to enhance privacy and reduce unnecessary information disclosure. The proposed approach is founded on two core components. The first is anonymous identification, which enables entities to interact with cloud services based on predefined privacy preferences without revealing their true identities. The second component introduces active bundles, which encapsulate personally identifiable information, usage policies, and an embedded execution environment responsible for enforcing privacy constraints. These bundles autonomously apply protection mechanisms to safeguard sensitive data, even when deployed on untrusted platforms. The proposed model offers several advantages, including reduced dependence on external identity providers, controlled disclosure of identity attributes to service providers, and secure utilization of identity data in untrusted cloud environments. By integrating privacy-enhancing technologies such as zero-knowledge proofs, the framework provides a robust and flexible solution for privacy-aware identity management in modern cloud-based systems.