Solving Identity Management in Modern Applications: Demystifying OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, and SAML 2.0

© Yvonne Wilson, Abhishek Hingnikar  2019

Y. Wilson, A. HingnikarSolving Identity Management in Modern Applicationshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-5095-2_2

2. The Life of an Identity

Yvonne Wilson¹  and Abhishek Hingnikar²

(1)

San Francisco, CA, USA

(2)

London, UK

 

That it will never come again is what makes life so sweet.

—Emily Dickinson in “That it will never come again” (1741)

To clarify the terms used in subsequent chapters, we need to describe what an identity is and how it is used, as well as the most common events in the life of an identity.

Terminology

The concepts of an identity, an identifier, and an account are closely related but subtly different. We use the term “identifier” to refer to a single attribute whose purpose is to uniquely identify ...