VirtualLife: Secure Identity Management in Peer-to-Peer Systems

The popularity of virtual worlds and their increasing economic impact has created a situation where the value of trusted identification has risen substantially. We propose an identity management solution that provides the user with secure credentials and allows to decrease the required trust that the user must have towards the server running the virtual world. Additionally, the identity management system allows the virtual world to incorporate reputation information. This allows the “wisdom of the crowd” to provide more input to users about the reliability of a certain identity. We describe how to use these identities to provide secure services in the virtual world. These include secure communications, digital signatures and secure bindings to external services.