Patent ID: 7058798

Claim:
A method of pro-actively refreshing credentials by an entity that maintains credentials, the method comprising: a) determining credentials that are required to access resources including resource-specific constraints that indicate when the credentials must be refreshed; b) storing in a memory, a profile collection having at least one credential profile, each credential profile including a credential, resource-specific constraints for the credential and related information; and c) for each credential profile in the profile collection: i) in accordance with at least one criterion of a refresh policy and prior to a time of presentation of the credential, making a determination, from that credential profile's resource-specific constraints, of whether that credential needs to be refreshed so that, at the time of presentation, that credential will meet the resource-specific constraints; ii) replacing the stored credential with a new credential in the credential profile if the stored credential does need to be refreshed; and iii) updating the related information of the new credential in the credential profile.