Preserving privacy with digital identities

Abstract

A privacy-preserving identity system is described herein that combines low disclosure tokens with an identity metasystem to allow proof of a user's identity and other claims about the user in a manner that preserves the user's privacy by avoiding disclosing unnecessary information about the user. A low or minimal disclosure token is a security token that encodes claims in such a way that (1) the token can be long-lived, (2) the token can be presented in an unlinkable manner, or (3) the user can minimally disclose the encoded information to respond to an unanticipated Relying Party policy. Using the privacy preserving system within an identity metasystem, users can obtain long-lived, low disclosure tokens from the Identity Provider and later present them to Relying Parties; thus improving both users' privacy and the system's scalability.