By her own admission, Anna Soames has no talent for remembering passwords.

Just to operate day-to-day, though, the London-based accountant needs no fewer than eight: three for work, another three for separate bank accounts, two for e-mail addresses she keeps, and one for her post-graduate university course. Each invariably has its own login.

“I generally go for a variation of my dog’s name,” Ms Soames, 29, said. “But sometimes that’s not long enough, so I have to add numbers after it, and then I forget which numbers, and so I end up writing them all down in the back of my diary – which kind of defeats the purpose, I guess.”

Ms Soames is one of millions of internet users for whom the difficulty of remembering numerous logins and passwords – and the likelihood of forgetting them – is a source of increasing annoyance.

The problem of "login-itis" is, however, being addressed by several organisations which are developing what are known as ‘ID management systems’ – effectively password aggregators that will allow computer users to adopt a single login and password for all internet-based activities.

“The problem with the net is it was designed without a way for users to know the true identity of a site they were connecting to, which has led to phishing and ID fraud,” Steve Plank, the head of digital identity at Microsoft, said.

Traditionally internet retailers such as Amazon have relied on their own authentication systems to make sure that a user logging on to the service is who they say they are.

What Microsoft’s new ID management system, called Cardspace, promises is to use existing services with whom a user is registered to authenticate that user to new services – removing the need for multiple logins.

When a user goes to a login page, instead of them seeing the usual boxes for name and password, a different screen would appear showing the services with which they are already registered, such as a banks, Amazon and e-mail accounts.

The site then decides whether to trust that user based on his or her existing registrations. The idea is that if the ID the user has provided is good enough for a bank, for example, then it will be good enough for whatever site they are trying to log onto, Mr Plank said.

Another system, called OpenID, which has recently been embraced by AOL, works on a similar premise. It requires fewer components of the user’s identity for authentication, which has led some to criticise it for being unsafe.

“The advantage to customers is clear – you get a single sign-on, you don't have to repeatedly give the same information like address and post code to multiple sites, and, provided the security is good, you can't get phished,” Ben Laurie, an independent cryptography expert, said.

Mr Laurie said that Cardspace, which demands a greater amount of information about the user and also uses cryptography, was currently a more secure offering than OpenID. He added that whichever system eventually succeeds, password management was “a coming thing”.

Dick Hardt, the chief executive of Sxip Identity, a Canadian company which co-wrote the OpenID protocol, said OpenID was no less safe than Microsoft's system. Its role, he said, was to provide the standard by which websites requiring authentication talked to one another, rather than to set security standards.

"The way in which you prove who you are to your OpenID provider – be that bio-metrics, voice detection, or whatever - would remain up to the user," he said, "and is not one of the goals of OpenID."

Microsoft, which has incorporated Cardspace into its new Vista operating system, said that it was in talks with all the major banks and internet retailers about introducing its software, but that none so far had signed up.

Some campaigners have expressed concern that proprietary programs for managing online identities place too much power in the hands of the companies that own them. Rufus Pollock, director of the Open Knowledge Foundation, a group which promotes open access to software, said he was more comfortable with OpenID's approach.

“The great thing about OpenID, as opposed to Microsoft Passport, the ID system which can be used by Hotmail customers, is that no-one owns the data,” he said. Microsoft said that Cardspace does not hold information centrally, and simply facilitates the transfer of data.