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German UDS
Digital Identities

The average Internet user has more than 25 Internet accounts, which are created for a wide variety of purposes. Besides accounts for e-mail services or social networks, users need access to learning platforms or online shopping services. Each of these internet accounts represents an individual digital identity. Each of these digital identities in turn contains a wide variety of personal information. In addition to information used to authenticate a user, such as an e-mail address or a password, further personal and sensitive data are required, such as bank details for payment or the place of residence for the subsequent delivery of an order. In this course we will consider such digital identities in detail. We explain cyber threads against digital identity and which techniques are available for a secure identity management.

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    04:00 h/week
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Digital Identities

About This Course

The average Internet user has more than 25 Internet accounts, which are created for a wide variety of purposes. Besides accounts for e-mail services or social networks, users need access to learning platforms or online shopping services. Each of these internet accounts represents an individual digital identity. Each of these identities in turn contains a wide variety of personal information. In addition to information used to authenticate a user, such as an e-mail address and password, other services require very personal and sensitive data, such as bank details for payment and the place of residence for the subsequent delivery of an order.

The amount and variety of personal information that a digital identity can define provides cyber criminals with extensive opportunities for data misuse in the event of data theft. The protection of digital identities is therefore becoming increasingly important.

In this course we will look at how a digital identity is defined and what attributes such an identity can have. We will also explain which methods can be used to authenticate an identity and which techniques are available for identity management.

Another section of the course will look at different forms of attack on digital identities and give advice on how users can better protect their data. An important element in this context is the knowledge about secure passwords, possible attacks against passwords and secure methods for password storage.

Course Topics

  • Introduction and Definition
  • Identity Management
  • Types of Identity Management
  • Technologies, Protocols, Standards
  • Authentication of Identities
  • Attacks on Identities
  • Identity Theft
  • Attacks on Passwords
  • Password Security

Required Skills

General IT knowledge.

Course Level

Basics

Target Group

Anyone who spends a lot of time online and wants to protect themselves against identity theft.

Effort

3-6 hours per week

Course Staff

Prof. Dr. Christoph Meinel

Prof. Dr. Christoph Meinel

Christoph Meinel (Univ.-Prof., Dr.rer.nat., Dr.sc.nat., 1954) is the founding president of the German University of Digital Science, the first European digital university, and its learning platform German-UDS.academy. Until March 2023 he was for almost 20 years the managing and scientific director of the Hasso Plattner Institute for Digital Engineering gGmbH. There he developed and established the first European MOOC platform openHPI.de as a full professor (C4) for Informatics at the university of Potsdam with his chair for "Internet Technology and Systems" at the HPI. From 2017 to 2021 he was the founding dean of the Digital Engineering Faculty of the University of Potsdam. His research interests are broadly diversified in the area of innovative Internet applications and systems, especially in digital education and e-learning, artificial intelligence and deep learning, and Internet and information security. He is also active in the field of innovation research and investigates the Stanford innovation method design thinking. In his former research work he was active in telemedicine, as well as in complexity theory and efficient OBDD-based algorithms and data structures. Christoph Meinel is a member of acatech, the national German Academy of Science and Engineering and has publish more than 800 peer reviewed scientific papers.

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