Enabling collaboration between heterogeneous circles of trust through innovative identity solutions

During the last years, the growth of e-commerce has been considerable due to the increase of user confidence in secure electronic payment. Many web services have been developed and some decided to establish links of confidence, also called circles of trust. A user that accesses a web service in a circle of trust can also access other web services of the circle without additional authentication. In that way, the web services offer is larger and clients´ demands more satisfied. Circles of trust are naturally composed of web services from the same type of activity. In this article, we address the problem of federating heterogeneous circles of trust. The main objective is to develop new e-services based on the composition of heterogeneous services. For instance, an application can be the electronic registration of a child to a day-care center: parents will need documents from their bank (in order to pay), from the government (to prove its identity), and from other sources. The preliminary results introduced here are issued from a French innovative research project called FC² that deals with the federation of heterogeneous circles of trust.