An Investigation of Challenges to Online Federated Identity Management Systems

National and global economic, governmental and social activities now rely more and more on the Internet. Online Identity Management (IdM) is a crucial component of those activities. Today, organisations in both the public and private sectors vary significantly in their approaches to IdM, devising their own means for establishing, verifying, storing and using digital identities over their networks and the Internet. Thus, the lack of common policies and approaches to such Federated IdM systems creates privacy, security and productivity issues in the increasingly interconnected economies, and hampers the ability of organisations to provide users with convenient services. This paper presents the investigation and discussion of challenges faced in implementing the Federated IdM in the online system. Also, a trust-based framework is discussed in order to combat these challenges.