Skip to Main Content
Digital Identity
book

Digital Identity

by Phillip J. Windley
August 2005
Beginner content levelBeginner
256 pages
8h 26m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Digital Identity

Identity, Security, and Privacy

Digital identity is often thought of as a subtopic of computer or information security. Certainly, digital identity is an important part of security, but digital identity has greater utility than just protecting information. We've already discussed how digital identity enables important business relationships. At the same time, information security is about more than simply performing authorization and authentication. Firewalls, for example, provide security but is not necessarily about identity.

Still, the goal of information security is to protect information from unauthorized access, destruction, or alteration. Privacy is the protection of the attributes, preferences, and traits associated with an identity from being disseminated beyond the subject's needs in any particular transaction. In a circular manner, privacy is built upon a foundation of good information security, which is, in turn, dependent on a good digital identity infrastructure. This relationship is shown in Figure 2-2.

The identity, security, privacy triangle

Figure 2-2. The identity, security, privacy triangle

We will discuss privacy in some detail in Chapter 4. Computer security, beyond the concepts that it has in common with identity, is beyond the scope of this book.

Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Start your free trial

You might also like

Learning Digital Identity

Learning Digital Identity

Phillip J. Windley
Self-Sovereign Identity

Self-Sovereign Identity

Alex Preukschat, Drummond Reed

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 0596008783Errata Page