Grant
$37,320 - 12/99

Project/Description

IndentiScape: Architechtural Support for Personal Online Identities

Personal communications are slowly entering maturity, becoming diverse, pervasive and popular. As this maturity is realized, it is becoming clear that personal communications have names for many things (cellular telephones, email or instant messageing accounts, videophones) but not for their target beneficiary, the person. This causes problems ranging from the inconvenient to the downright dangerous: to locate a person, callers must remember potentially multiple email addresses, cellphone numbers, landline phone numbers or instant messaging IDs; sensitive messages are left on shared voicemail boxes; communications intended for the previous owners of a telephone number are delivered to the next owner.

In this project, we aim to design and implement a deployable, practical solution to this problem. IdentiScape is a global personal identity service, using a simple, memorable namespace, through which all our personal online interactions can be deterministically and consistently addressed.

Current Status
In the process of implementing and evaluating a narrow-scope prototype for the service.

USENIX Conference
Hoping to submit it for publication in OSDI 2000.