BlindIdM: A Privacy-Preserving Approach for Identity Management as a Service

Identity management is an almost indispensable component of today’s organizations and companies, as it plays a key role in authentication and access control; however, at the same time it is widely recognized as a costly and time-consuming task. The advent of cloud computing technologies, together with the promise of flexible, cheap and efficient provision of services, has provided the opportunity to externalize such a common process, shaping what has been called Identity Management as a Service (IDaaS). Nevertheless, as in the case of other cloud-based services, IDaaS brings with it great concerns regarding security and privacy, such as the loss of control over the outsourced data. In this paper we analyze these concerns and propose BlindIdM, a model for privacy-preserving IDaaS with a focus on data privacy protection. In particular, we describe how a SAML-based system can be augmented to employ proxy re-encryption techniques for achieving data condentiality with respect to the cloud provider, while preserving the ability to supply the identity service. This is an innovative contribution to both the privacy and identity management landscapes.