User Centric Media - First International Conference, UCMedia 2009, Venice, Italy, December 9-11, 2009, Revised Selected Papers (Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Vol 40)

"VirtualLife: Secure Identity Management in Peer-to-Peer Systems (p. 181-182)

1 Introduction

Online virtual worlds are popular among users and organizations. Virtual environments like Second Life and ActiveWorlds are actively used by companies and organizations to promote their products and services[1]. Establishing a visible presence in such a world has become a marketing strategy. The users are interested in virtual worlds for the social interaction and entertainment possibilities. Building a virtual world to attract both users and service providers requires a strong technical framework and a well-defined focus. In our work we address the issue of identity verification and trusted service provision.

Most of the online worlds currently in active use put little effort on the identification of participants. This is a problem for anyone who has to trust the presented identity of their communication partner. Onemotivating example is a business transaction, where parties need to identify each other to enter an agreement. Another is a system that verifies the users’ age to restrict access to age-specific content or provides age information to communication partners. The last example can be extremely motivating for parents whose children engage in online chats. Also, if a user conducts a criminal act inside the virtual world, then it can be claimed that the responsibility lies on the virtual world provider, because it did not fully identify the user.

Our contribution.
We present a holistic solution to identity management and its applications in an online virtual world. We propose a way to handle the assignment and storage of identity information, how to prove identities to other participants and how to build services that use this information. We also describe techniques to make the system more intuitive for users by providing visual indicators of the strength of identity and trust information. The solution has been developed in conjunction with the VirtualLife virtual world [2] and it has been implemented within that world. The usage of the proposed identity management system relies on the following assumptions: the capability to use X.509 security infrastructure and the capability to establish network connection to any node in the system.

Although the solution is generic and can be used in any multi-user system, it was developed and adjusted for use in 3D worlds. It relies on a custom peer-to-peer messaging layer, that is complicated to implement in browser-based virtual worlds. In this paper we introduce VirtualLife and its identity management system. We discuss how a variety of services can be built using this system and how they benefit from its properties. This is the underlying work for further research that may be conducted once the VirtualLife system is online and actual user experiences can be taken into account."