Computer Science researchers at Karlstad University received Best Paper award at the top ranked research conference ISD, Information Systems Development 2017. The paper concerns users’ perspectives on a cloud-based personal identity management and it is connected to the CREDENTIAL project which Karlstad University is involved.
“I was surprised when they announced our paper as the winner of the award but I was also very happy, of course. We have put a lot of efforts into user studies and it feels good that the content of our paper is appreciated”, says Farzaneh Karegar, PhD student within Computer Science at Karlstad University and the main author of the paper.
Online services and ways to access them are constantly increasing. Within the CREDENTIAL project a cloud-based, highly secure and user-friendly service for identity and access management is under development, the CREDENTIAL wallet. The CREDENTIAL Wallet, a mobile app on users’ devices, will help users to authenticate and access different online services and manage their personal information in an understandable way and by that avoid handling a huge number of different usernames and passwords.
The data is only visible to the user and the authorized online service due to encryption algorithms used in the project. For example, proxy re-encryption helps to hide the plain text from the CREDENTIAL Wallet which just re-encrypts the encrypted data in a way that only the authorized online service can decrypt to see the plain text. This way the CREDENTIAL wallet can serve different kind of online services securely and in a more privacy-friendly manner.
As a part of the project usability tests have been carried out to investigate the users’ perceptions on such a service and how the information is processed when the system is used for identity and access management.
“Our tests show that it’s hard for users to understand what is happening to their data when using an identity and access management application and new methods can be integrated without obstructing them to slow them down in order to pay more attention”, says Farzaneh Karegar. “Familiarity with ID apps appeared to aggravate misunderstanding and some participants voiced a desire to have control over their data and expressed a wish to manually select mandatory information. “
ISD 2017 was a three-day conference that took place September 6-8 in Cypress. Approximately 60 master students, PhD students and senior researchers took part. 48 papers were accepted and two of them were selected for the Best Paper Award.
The paper “Assessments of a Cloud-Based Data Wallet for Personal Identity Management” was produced by Farzaneh Karegar (research student in Computer Science), Daniel Lindgren (project assistant), John Sören Pettersson (professor in Informatics) and Simone Fischer-Hübner (professor in Computer Science).
“The acknowledgment on an a-ranked conference is first of all prestigious and also a great opportunity to spread the research taking place within the Credential project and our research environment”, says Simone Fischer-Hübner.
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