are concerned with the creation, the administration and the deployment of: Identifiers: Data used to identify a subject. Credentials: Data providing evidence for claims about identities or parts thereof. Attributes: Data describing characteristics of a subject. The purposes of identity management systems are: Identification: Who is the user – used on logon or database lookup Authentication: Is this the real user? Systems needs to provide evidence! Authorization and non-repudiation: Authorization of documents or transaction with e-ID and most often with digital signature based on e-ID. Generates non-repudiation and receipts. Commercial solutions Identity-management systems, products, applications, and platforms are commercial Identity-management solutions implemented for enterprises and organizations. Technologies, services, and terms related to identity management include Microsoft Windows active directory, service providers, identity providers, Web services, access control, digital identities, password managers, single sign-on, security tokens, security token services (STS), workflows, OpenID, WS-Security, WS-Trust, SAML 2.0, OAuth, and RBAC. Electronic identity management In general, electronic IdM can be said to cover the management of any form of digital identities. The focus on identity management goes back to the development of directories, such as X.500, where a namespace serves to hold named objects that represent real-life "identified" entities, such as countries, organizations, applications, subscribers or devices. The X.509 ITU-T standard defined certificates carried identity attributes as two directory names: the certificate subject and the certificate issuer. X.509 certificates and PKI systems operate to prove the online "identity" of a subject. Therefore, in IT terms, one can consider identity management as the management of information (as held in a directory) that represents items identified in real life (e.g. users, organizations, devices, services, etc.). The design of such systems requires explicit information and identity engineering tasks. The evolution of identity management follows the progression of Internet technology closely. In the environment of static web pages and static portals of the early 1990s, corporations investigated the delivery of informative web content such as the "white pages" of employees. Subsequently, as the information changed (due to employee turnover, provisioning and de-provisioning), the ability to perform self-service and help-desk updates more efficiently morphed into what became known as Identity Management . Solutions Solutions which fall under the category of identity management may include: Management of identities Provisioning/De-provisioning of accounts Workflow automation Delegated administration Password synchronization Self-service password reset Access control Password manager Single sign-on (SSO) Web single sign-on (Web SSO) Role-based access control (RBAC) Attribute based access