A Look at the Third-Party Identity Management Landscape

Many websites act as relying parties (RPs) by allowing access to their services via third-party identity providers (IDPs), such as Facebook and Google. Using IDPs simplifies account creation, login activity, and information sharing across websites. However, different websites' use of IDPs can have significant security and privacy implications for users. This work overviews the current state of the third-party identity management landscape. Datasets collected using both manual identification and large-scale crawling are used to answer questions related to which sites act as RPs, which sites are the most successful IDPs, and how different classes of RPs select their IDPs. The authors also analyze and discuss longitudinal changes in the landscape.