Abstract.
User personas are fictional characters representing the goals and behaviours of a hypothesized group of users. For example, a person might have two personas: Stella Student and Tully Tutor. When she is acting as Tully, this person wants to access Cecil with her Tutor rights and she wants to access the course Facebook page.
When she is acting as Stella, she wants to access Cecil with her Student rights and she wants to access her personal Facebook page. This dissertation describes the specification and high level design of a user-centric identity management system regarding user persona. Identity management systems usually require high standard of security and privacy to be fully functional. I propose a design for a Persona-aware Identity Management System (PIdM), to make it easier and safer for Stella Student and Tully Tutor to use the same handheld devices and personal computers.
Identity management systems are traditionally built on service-oriented approach, which means that a service provider has authority to manage identities of users. Traditional approach to identity management has had adverse effects on the user experience, so identity management research has emerged with user's perspective.
To preserve usability of the user-centric identity management but enhance security and privacy, Persona aware Identity management system (PIdM) is introduced in this dissertation. A current single sing on and user-centric identity management systems are examined comparison to PIdM. We use few user scenarios to explain how Persona aware Identity management works.
The paper then presents possible implementation of persona concept through manipulation of existing methods. The benefits of inclusion of persona identification and managements in a user-centric management system are discussed. The main problem is to apply PIdM in the business model. The purpose of the paper is to improve security and privacy takes place in persona-aware identity management with user-centric perspective.