‘Open,Sesame?’ – the problems of digital identity and secure access to information in the Internet era: issues for the information industry

As personal, commercial and legal transactions are increasingly performed electronically, questions of security and proof of identity appear ever more urgent and problematic. The legislative emphasis of national governments has shifted from data protection to defining how ‘digital signatures’ can be used to certify an individual’s identity in electronic transactions. However the old system of password protection is becoming unwieldy, if only because the average employee must now remember 15 different passwords. Reviews the major issues of digital identity and secure access to networked information, analyses the causes of the current discontinuities in access control methodologies and discusses initiatives originating in both the academic and commercial sectors, together with proposed technology driven solutions that depend on Public-Key Infrastructure (PKI). Examines how the electronic information community’s primary participants might position themselves in relation to the new era of electronic credentials and argues that successful solutions will be those that acknowledge and enact the characteristics of the contractual relationships between electronic information users, mediators and vendors.