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Orlando, USA, and Zurich, Switzerland, 24 September 2008—At
the IAPP Privacy Academy 2008 in Orlando, Florida, the European
research project Privacy and Identity Management for Europe (PRIME),
which has been led by IBM’s (NYSE: IBM) Zurich Research
Lab, was internationally recognized by the leading privacy association
for its pioneering concepts and solutions for user-centric privacy
and identity management.
While information technologies and the Internet are bringing individuals
and organizations continuous benefits and hold even greater promise
for the future, because of the growing efficiency of mining and
storing digital data, privacy of users is at greater risk than
ever before. To preserve this essential right, the individual's
autonomy and control over personal information must be regained
and maintained.
“The PRIME project was instrumental in transforming the
privacy landscape. Before PRIME, identity management on the Internet
did not take the user’s privacy into account. Now, the notion
of user-centric privacy-enhancing identity management has become
mainstream,” states Dr. Jan Camenisch of IBM’s Zurich
Research Lab and PRIME’s technical leader. “Moreover,
with the new technical solutions developed within the project,
we could indeed demonstrate that privacy-enhancing identity management
is ready for practice.”
User-centric identity management is all about putting the users
back in control of their personal data on the Internet. At the
heart of the solution are mechanisms that reduce the use of personal
data in Internet services and applications to the essential and
required minimum. The PRIME integrated prototype, which was one
of the important achievements recognized by the IAPP Privacy Innovation
Award, is a pioneering solution that demonstrates how such a system
can be implemented technologically: The PRIME client software works
as a pseudonym manager and includes convenient form-filler functions.
If also the Internet service provider is PRIME-enabled, the software
will permit anonymous transactions using credentials issued by
trusted third parties, thereby enabling secure Internet transactions
without actually transmitting and thus exposing personal information.
A core component of the prototype is the Identity Mixer technology,
developed at IBM’s Zurich Research Lab. Using that system,
participants of a teenage on-line forum, for example, could use
their government-issued identity credential to confirm that they
are indeed between 12 and 15 years old. The Identity Mixer
software digitally masks the credential so that the user can send
it to the forum provider and get legitimate access to the forum
without revealing any other identity information apart from that
he or she is 12 to 15 years old. The system also protects the user
from tracing and profiling based on authentication data.
PRIME has shown that privacy-enhancing identity management is
viable and ready for practice. PRIME built a sound foundation of
legal, social, economic, and application-specific requirements
to achieve this ambitious goal. As pure privacy technology, it
features an innovative architecture and framework for privacy and
identity management that govern privacy-relevant access control,
data retention, obligation, and policy elements. The PRIME components
were implemented in demonstrators for Internet browsing, location-based
services, collaborative e-learning, air travel, and e-health.
The PRIME project, which was completed in May 2008, was the flagship
project of the European Union’s Sixth Framework Programme
to address the privacy issue. It brought together 20 leading academic
and industrial research institutions, and also received funding
from the Swiss Federal Office for Education and Science.
The success of PRIME is evidenced by the number of offspring projects,
including “PrimeLife”, PICOS and PrivacyOS—bringing
privacy high up on the European research agenda. “PrimeLife”,
also coordinated by IBM’s Zurich Research Lab, is the direct
successor project of PRIME and aims at empowering users to manage
and control their personal data and privacy throughout their entire
lifetimes, whenever they participate in Web 2.0 technologies, such
as social networks or virtual communities, which raise substantial
new privacy challenges.
The IAPP Privacy Innovation Award, sponsored by HP, each year
honors winners in three categories: large enterprises, small enterprises,
and technology. PRIME received the award in the category technology,
2008 marks the sixth consecutive year that the IAPP will recognize
organizations that have made significant contributions to the field
of privacy.
About the IAPP
The International Association of Privacy Professionals (IAPP) is
the world's largest association of privacy professionals. Founded
in 2000, the mission of the IAPP is to define, promote, and improve
the privacy profession globally. Based in York, Maine, USA.,
the organization represents over 5,000 members from businesses,
governments and academia across 32 countries. The IAPP is responsible
for developing and launching the first broad-based credentialing
program in information privacy, the Certified
Information Privacy Professional (CIPP).
For more information on PRIME visit: www.prime-project.eu
For more information on PrimeLife visit: www.primelife.eu
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IBM Research
