Federation

In an open environment like the Internet purely centralized management of cyber-identities is neither achievable nor desired. The federation principle ensures an interoperable, flexible, secure and robust infrastructure. The service in the framework  provides the technical verification of the information by redirection to the appropriate information provider in order to create trust. However trust is not a technical issue. The data originator "receives a trust seal" from his local service provider. The verifier in another environment or country usually does not know and trust this service provider. The approach of this proposal is based on federation of "islands of trust" (i.e. specific UNIVERSE^® implementations) which grow together within

• Range (country, Europe, region)
• Coverage (sectoral, intersectoral)
• Federation is based on a peer-to-peer (P2P) model where all participating services are equal.

This federation model is explained in the graphic below:



Please note:

• In this model trust is not transitive, i.e. it is not mandatory to accept a "friend of a friend" as trusted.
• A node, i.e. a provider of a UNIVERSE^® decides which other services it wants to trust. In the diagram different possibilities / examples are outlined:
  • UNIVERSE "A" has a reciprocal trust relationship with all the other services
  • UNIVERSE "B" has a reciprocal trust relationship with "A" and "C".
  • UNIVERSE Service "B" also trusts UNIVERSE^® "E", but not vice versa.
  • "B" and "D", as well as "C" and "E" have no relationship with each other.

For federating with another UNIVERSE^® provider trust in this other provider is needed, i.e. in another "island of trust" and the referenced registers. A fundamental decision support is trust in careful handling of the registration procedures by this provider. Also sophisticated systems like Public Key Infrastructures (PKI) basically depend on careful registration of participants.
Reliable registration is the same main issue. In both systems trust depends ultimately on "who the service provider is".