Marco Casassa Mont is a senior researcher at HP Labs. Since joining HP Labs, in 1996, he has worked as a technical lead in various research programs with HP businesses and in the context of collaborative projects, such as the EU PRIME and UK TSB EnCoRe projects. His current R&D focus is on identity and privacy management and security analytics, specifically in emerging areas such as Web 2.0 and Cloud Computing.

Marco has a MSc and a Computer Science degree. He is an IEEE Senior Member: he is very active in the publication front.

More information is available in his web page at http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Marco_Casassa_Mont/ .

Presentation

The Future of Identity in the Cloud: Requirements, Risks and Opportunities

This presentation aims at setting the context about Identity in the Cloud; discussing related identity management issues along with core requirements (coming from users and organisations); illustrating, from an HP Labs’ perspective, future possible models, approaches and IT infrastructures to handle Identity in the Cloud.
An overview of Cloud Computing and its implications is provided, in terms of service provisioning, security, privacy and identity management.

Use cases are introduced to illustrate “common” usage and management tasks involving Identity in the Cloud - from both user and organisational perspectives, including the implications of having to deal with Identity in composable and dynamic services. New emerging, related threats and risks are briefly discussed, such as the potential growth of bogus service providers, targeted attacks to the weakest points in the service provisioning chain and identity thefts.

This leads to a discussion of key requirements, determined by new interaction models and service-provisioning paradigms in the Cloud.

Current (categories of) identity management solutions and approaches that deal with aspects of Identity in the Cloud (such as identity federation, identity brokering, Identity 2.0, etc.) are briefly illustrated, along with their pros and cons and failures to address some of the core requirements (such as assurance, trust and privacy control).
The final part of this presentation challenges current assumptions and approaches and illustrates future directions, by presenting HP Labs’ medium and long–term vision about how the underlying Cloud infrastructure is going to evolve, along with its implication in terms of Identity and Identity Management and new opportunities in this space. This includes the paradigm shifts introduced by the usage of trusted virtualisation, remote attestation of platform capabilities (Trusted Computing Platforms) and identity-driven computational environment (coming from the cloud) that could run on local systems (e.g. at the user side); new emerging identity management models driven by identity-aware platforms and policy-driven delegation of credentials; the role that Security and Identity Analytics can play, by using modelling and simulation, to help organisations to evaluating and predicting the consequences of using services in the Cloud.

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