Federated identity management in mobile dynamic virtual organizations

Over the past few years, the Virtual Organization (VO) paradigm has beenemerging as an ideal solution to support collaboration among globally distributedentities (individuals and/or organizations). However, due to rapid technological andsocietal changes, there has also been an astonishing growth in technologies andservices for mobile users. This has opened up new collaborative scenarios where thesame participant can access the VO from different locations and mobility becomes akey issue for users and services. The nomadicity and mobility introduces additionalchallenges for managing collaboration in VO environments. This paper focuses onthe Identity Management challenge in a Mobile Dynamic VO environment, which isa VO that takes into account nomadicity and seamless mobility aspects as elaboratedwithin the EU funded project Akogrimo (Access to Knowledge through the Grid in amobile world). The resulting work is the design of the Akogrimo IdentityManagement system supporting the authentication and authorization process acrossthe different administrative domains of the Mobile Dynamic VO. This designfollows the service oriented approach and integrates the different perspectives: thatof the network, that of the user and that of the service provider. Such an integrationrequires facing challenges; both from the architectural and technological viewpointsbecause different ‘worlds’ (i.e. network and service level) leverage different (andsometimes conflicting) approaches when addressing Identity Management