Performance Evaluation of Identity and Access Management Systems in Federated Environments

Identity and access management (IAM) systems are used to assure authorized access to services in distributed environments. The architecture of IAM systems, in particular the arrangement of the involved components, has significant impact on performance and scalability of the overall system. Furthermore, factors like robustness and even privacy that are not related to performance have to be considered. Hence, systematic engineering of IAM systems demands for criteria and metrics to differentiate architectural approaches. The rise of service-oriented architectures and cross-organizational integration efforts in federations will additionally increase the importance of appropriate IAM systems in the future. While previous work focused on qualitative evaluation criteria, we extend these criteria by metrics to gain quantitative measures. The contribution of this paper is twofold: i) We propose a system model and corresponding metrics to evaluate different IAM system architectures on a quantitative basis. ii) We present a simulation-based performance evaluation study that shows the suitability of this system model.