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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

Trust and Evidence

One day I went to the store to buy a disposable camera for my son to take to an activity. As I stood before the display rack, I pondered which of several choices I should buy. One bore the brand of a reputable company with a strong reputation in the world of photography. The other camera bore the house brand of the store I was at. The house-branded camera was $1 cheaper than the camera with the national brand. I bought the more expensive camera, even though they may have actually been manufactured in the same facility on the same day. Why? Because the brand was evidence that I could trust that the camera would work and the film would be good quality. The $1 extra that this evidence cost me seemed a reasonable trade-off to avoid the risk of missing the shots.

Just as in the physical world, trust in a digital identity is ultimately based on some set of evidence. For example, when you log into your computer, you present an identity in the form of a user ID and evidence that you are the person to whom that ID refers by typing in a password. The password is evidence that the computer should trust that you are who you say you are.

Sometimes the evidence for trust in a computer-based transaction is explicit and automatically collected as in our password example. At other times, the evidence is present but less visible than in physical situations. For example, when I conduct an electronic transaction at http://Amazon.com, their digital certificate presents evidence to my ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 0596008783Errata Page