Future of PI: Challenges and Perspectives of Personal Identification

Every day, billions of users demonstrate various aspects about themselves to digital service providers with the help of digital Identity Management (IdM) systems. The involved technologies range from simple passwords to user certificates, anonymous credentials and the ubiquitous Single Sign-On systems. These approaches can be categorized along multiple axes, including how a digital identity is defined or acquired, the level of trust required towards third parties like identity providers, the amount of privacy protection, whether trusted hardware is assumed, the degree of user involvement that is necessary, or the deployment overhead. While these categories seem not inherently mutually exclusive, existing approaches arguably provide satisfactory solutions only according to some of them — and a broadly convincing solution is still lacking.

The goal of this workshop is to bring together academic researchers from various IdM-related domains, as well as practitioners, to improve the understanding of the current state and directions of IdM research, and identify open challenges towards secure and usable solutions. Discussions are fostered by a combination of selected and invited talks delivered by recognized experts in their respective fields, who review current digital IdM systems, highlight shortcomings in existing approaches, and identify new paths to resolve them. The talks will be complemented by a panel discussion on a topic identified as particularly pressing: user privacy.