Securing Digital Identities in the Cloud by Selecting an Apposite Federated Identity Management from SAML, OAuth and OpenID Connect Nitin Naik and Paul Jenkins Defence School of Communications and Information Systems Ministry of Defence, United Kingdom Email:
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[email protected] Abstract—Access to computer systems and the information this sensitive data over insecure channels poses a significant held on them, be it commercially or personally sensitive, is security and privacy risk. This risk can be mitigated by using naturally, strictly controlled by both legal and technical security the Federated Identity Management (FIdM) standard adopted measures. One such method is digital identity, which is used to authenticate and authorize users to provide access to IT in the cloud environment. Federated identity links and employs infrastructure to perform official, financial or sensitive operations users’ digital identities across several identity management within organisations. However, transmitting and sharing this systems [1], [2]. FIdM defines a unified set of policies and sensitive information with other organisations over insecure procedures allowing identity management information to be channels always poses a significant security and privacy risk. An transportable from one security domain to another [3], [4]. example of an effective solution to this problem is the Federated Identity Management (FIdM) standard adopted in the cloud Thus, a user accessing data/resources on one secure system environment. The FIdM standard is used to authenticate and could then access data/resources from another secure system authorize users across multiple organisations to obtain access without both systems needing individual identities for the to their networks and resources without transmitting sensitive single user.