Technical Report No. 178 - Abstract

Uwe Jendricke, Michael Kreutzer, Alf Zugenmaier
Mobile Identity Management

Privacy is a severe problem facing mobile computing. The fundamental question arises: Who gets to know personal data stored on handhelds? Most of current handhelds (personal digital assistants, mobile phones, etc.) are equipped with wireless communication interfaces like bluetooth or infrared. However they only have access controls for the user of the device, but do not consider which personal data is offered at different locations.This is a privacy problem because the information offered already allows the generation of various profiles of the device's user, for example location profiles. To improve the user's privacy, we propose an identity-based control over the data published and the services offered. Comparable to "normal life", this identity management allows the device to present different subsets of the user's identity depending on the perceived (wireless) communication context.