The University of Kent has been awarded £187,989 from the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) to help create logins for life. The 15 month project starts in January 2010 and the work will be jointly carried out by the School of Computing and Information Services.

Since the advent of the digital age a member of an organisation such as a university, has had some form of online identity. Today this may take many forms including a login, an email address and a web homepage. A problem of continuity of identity occurs when, for example, a person does collaborative work with another institution or leaves an organisation altogether and is required to create a new identity as part of their new role.

The 'Logins for Life' project addresses the needs of a University to engage with its members throughout their lives. Researchers will explore the different user requirements for the system and produce policies and recommendations for dealing with user accounts throughout their changing roles while catering for existing digital identities. It will also create a test environment which will demonstrate how these policies can be delivered using open source tools, several of which have been developed at the University of Kent.

The lead researchers for the project are David Chadwick, Professor of Information Systems Security, and George Inman, both from the School of Computing. The involvement from Information Services (IS) will be John Sotillo, Director of IS, as the grant holder and Peter Riley, Michael Wilcox and Bonnie Ferguson, who will be working jointly with Professor Chadwick's group throughout the project. Further assistance will be provided from the School's Information Systems and Security Research Group.

The project builds on the School's existing research and development from projects such as Shintau, Open ID and PERMIS, and will utilise the software that has already been developed for research purposes by trialling it in real life operational systems.

Prof. David Chadwick said:

" This project allows us to gain more experience about how our prototype software developed in our laboratories primarily for research and proof of concept purposes will need to be modified and adapted in order to meet real world operational needs. "

A project web site will be developed in the first month of the project.

Published 8 January 2010
Contact: M.L.Bowman@kent.ac.uk