Sebastian Tramp, Henry Story, Andrei Sambra, Philipp Frischmuth, Michael Martin and Sören Auer

This paper was submitted to the Third International Workshop on Consuming Linked Data (COLD2012).

The WebID protocol enables the global identification and authentication of agents in a distributed manner by combining asymmetric cryptography and Linked Data. In order to decide whether access should be granted or denied to a particular WebID, the authenticating web server may need to retrieve other profiles and linked resources to work out e.g. if the requesting agent is member of an authorized group. If these resources are required to be publicly available for the server to access it, then this would be a major privacy limitation on a linked Social Network. In this paper we explore different ways in which an agent can act as a user and we propose an extension to the WebID protocol which allows for delegation of access authorization from a WebID to a third party, e.g. allowing a server to be able to act on behalf of its users. This extends the range of application scenarios where WebID authentication can be efficiently deployed while increasing privacy.

@INPROCEEDINGS{WebIDDelegation,
  author = {Sebastian Tramp and Henry Story and Andrei Sambra and Philipp Frischmuth and Michael Martin and Sören Auer},
  title = {Extending the {W}eb{ID} {P}rotocol with {A}ccess {D}elegation},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Third International Workshop on Consuming Linked Data (COLD2012)},
  year = {2012},
  editor = {Andreas Harth and Olaf Hartig and Juan Sequeda},
  series = {CEUR Workshop Proceedings},
  publisher = {CEUR-WS.org}
}