The Review of Non-Technical Assumptions in Digital Identity Architectures

The literatureondigital identity management systems (IdM) is abundant andsolutionsvaryby technology components and non-technicalrequirements. In the long run, however, there is a need for exchanging iden-tities across domains or even borders,which requires interoperable solutions and flexible architectures. This article aims togivean overview of the current research on digital identitymanagement. We conducta system-atic literature review of digital identity solution archi-tectures and extract their inherent non-technical as-sumptions.The findings show thatsolutiondesigns can be based on organizational, business and trust assump-tions as well as human-user assumptions. Namely, es-tablishing the trust relationships and collaborations among participating organizations; human-users capa-bilityformaintaining private cryptographic materialor the assumptions that win-win business models could be easily identified.By reviewing the key findings of solu-tions proposed and looking at the differences and com-monalities of their technical, organizational and social requirements, we discuss their potential real-life inhib-itors and identify opportunities for future research in IdM.