Identity Management in Internet of Things with Blockchain

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1.1

What is Identity Management

Generally, identity management is the idea of ensuring that specific people/users can

(or cannot) access certain resources or places within an organization or closed envi-

ronment. It is known with many abbreviations including IAM/IDAM/IDM (identity

and access management), IGA (identity governance and administration), UM (user

management), and AM (access management). From here on and through the rest of

this chapter, identity management will be referred to as IAM.

In addition, in computer science, IAM is also known as a set of policies imple-

mented using programming tools and techniques for managing and validating an

entity’s proper and, technically, legal access to data, services and applications [8].

This is a process that secures the interaction of applications with users and other appli-

cations or services as well and it works both ways. The system itself can be protected

by some malicious activity by identifying who is trying to access its resources and

making sure that they are who they say they are while, on the other hand, end users

feel safe about their data privacy. Moreover, IAM can be used properly in order to

give the functionality of control over one’s data and who they can share it with.

1.2

Related Concepts and Terminology—IAM

Within the IoT context, an identity is the digital representation of any participant

within a specific environment or domain (Fig. 1). The participants may be any person

Fig. 1 (Left) Components and functionality of an IAM system (Right) Identity and attributes data

example