Posted November 17th, 2009
A friend in the industry recently asked me for my thoughts on OpenID, InfoCards, and the US federal government’s work to consume non-government issued credentials. Letting the question rattle around in my head for a while, here’s what I’ve got so far.
My hope is that the overall ICAM initiative is successful—not because I have been eagerly waiting to interact with the federal government using some form of authenticated credential—but because we (citizens, enterprises and government) are at a pivotal moment in the history of the web. With the US government working with both the OpenID and InfoCard Foundations, there exists an opportunity to change how individuals interact with large organizations, both public and private. For the first time, individuals would be able to (even encouraged to) interact with a large organization (such as the US federal government) using an identity asserted, not by the large organization, but by the individual. In this case, the State is no longer the sole provider of identity. This breaks the monopoly that the State has had on credentials and is indicative of the future to come.
But there is a long road to walk before getting there. There are numerous concerns with these plans. Among these are notable security concerns, especially with OpenID, that the identity community is not blind to. These are not my primary concerns. Continue reading "Hopes and concerns for identity"...
Posted March 9th, 2007
So Mike Neuenschwander hung a softball out there with his latest post on becoming an OpenID power user. Dave Kearns was quick to take a swing at it with his response to Mike’s summarization: “There are no identifiers, only attributes.”
Mike’s journey to OpenID begins with a single step – getting an OpenID, which is really an exercise in picking a name. Names are important. (I am going to stop myself from going into a discussion of the gravity of names and naming. Literature is soaked in naming issues.) As Mike points out he can pick any unused name (really, any set of unused characters.) The first person in to register ian.glazer.myopenid.com can purport to being Ian Glazer. This is no different than XRI name registration or domain registration or copyright registration… you get the idea.
Dave goes from there and reminds us that identifiers have to be unique within a given namespace. He uses the example of disambiguating family members. He provides one of the most familiar examples on unique identifiers:
Your email address – every single one of them – is a unique identifier within the entire world of the internet.
What is hidden in Dave’s comments is the role of context. Given the context of family, Dave’s non-unique identifier can be disambiguated. We use the domain name in an email address to set context. I know that an email coming from mike@burton is likely to be of a professional nature and an email coming from mike@igotsmesomefreeemail is likely to not be. The context of how you use your identifier is meaningful. Continue reading "No identifiers, just attributes, uniqueness: Where’s the context?"...
Posted February 13th, 2007
I was reading about Conor Cahill’s workshop at RSA on secure provisioning of network credentials over the wire. It was a joint proof of concept between Intel, BT, and HP using Liberty’s ID-WSF Advanced Client. They talked about how to get credentials from service providers down into a client environment. (Although it is not a requirement, clearly Intel would love it if the client environment was a TPM-like object.)
One aspect of all this is a provisioning service, one for which Liberty has cooked up a spec. As a user provisioning guy this model of provisioning looked a bit strange to me. Think telephone service provisioning, not enterprise user account provisioning. The funny thing is, I thought there already was a perfectly good provisioning service standard out there – Service Provisioning Markup Language (SPML).
That got me thinking. Provisioning is an aspect of the identity lifecycle that you don’t really hear about in talks on Higgins and CardSpace and such. This is a bit of history repeating itself. Back in the day, the authentication guys got all the glory, all the publicity, and when it came time to make sure there were actually credentials in back-end services, they waved their hands. It was the lowly user provisioning system, the late-shift janitor of the identity world, that actually had to do the dirty work. Who is this janitor in the user-centric identity world? Continue reading "Is SPML irrelevant in the coming CardSpace/Higgins/OpenID identity world?"...
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