Identity Future

Being that good software — the social software that’s nearly synonymous with Web 2.0 — is stuff that gets you laid, where does that leave IdM?

Danah Boyd might not have been thinking about it in exactly those terms, but her approach is uniquely social-centered. She proposes “SecureId”

What is SecureId? SecureId is a program that helps you protect and control your digital identity by allowing you to determine who can access your private information. By allowing you to articulate your digital contexts based on facets of your identity, SecureId provides the framework for you to properly relate identity information and people with contexts, thereby giving you the ability to portray yourself properly. SecureId uses a knowledge-based security system to help you manage access to various facets of your identity. By presenting you with a portrait of your digital identity, SecureId also gives you a virtual mirror to your social performance.

Reading further, she implores us to “imagine that you are in control of your digital identity.”

The information you give out on a daily basis is quite context dependent. While you might give your medical history to your doctor, would you give it to a random stranger? Does your language differ between work, the pub and at home with your 3-year-old? What about your clothing? Not only do you make different decisions based on the level of trust you have, but also based on what is socially appropriate. Speaking to your boss like you speak to your child might be both inappropriate and offensive. Do you have different groups of friends, family and associations that may or may not interact with one another? What roles do you play in your life and how do aspects of your character change when you are in these different roles?

SecureId offers you an interactive visual landscape for articulating your identity facets and associating appropriate data with them. Through this mechanism, you can quickly see who has access to what aspects of your self. By presenting you with a portrait of your digital identity, SecureId also gives you a virtual mirror to your social performance, an awareness that is taken for granted in the physical world.

danah boyd, context dependent identity, identity management, idm, social, social aspects, social identity, social idm, social interaction, social networks, social software

From NoSheep.net’s article:

In SunGard Higher Education’s Luminis product one of the many add-on packages you can install is CAS support. CAS is an acronym for Central Authentication Service. This WebISO solution is one of the most common in higher education. CAS was created originally by Yale, but ongoing support has been taken over by JA-SIG. When the CAS package is installed in Luminis, it makes Luminis act as a CAS authentication provider. Coupled with this built-in Luminis support, we use a CAS library called phpCAS that adds to the simplicity of deploying this within our environment.

Time and again, CAS has been proven an effective and simple way for us to quickly drop authentication ability into our homegrown PHP applications. Once a function was developed, this was easily reused across dozens of applications within a few short months. The ease of deployment made it easy to convince various developers to switch from custom authentication schemes.

He then goes on to provide example code of how CAS deployed through Luminis can be leveraged with PHP.

authentication, cas, luminis, nosheep, php, phpcas, sct, sungard, sungard higher education, webiso, yale, yalecas

From emails with Johannes Ernst concerning what NetMesh is all about and why they are exciting:

At NetMesh, we build a Web 2.0 software platform whose objective is to empower the individual — by loose analogy, like Visicalc empowered the individual in the PC era, except of course that the world is very different now.

Decentralized, user-controlled identity is the bottom-layer in that platform because without knowing who is at the other end in any individual-to-individual interaction, nothing (important) happens. That’s why we created LID — the first URL-based, very simple identity technology. We also help co-initiate Yadis, which is now acting as a focal point for the integration of a whole bunch of simple, internet-scale, decentralized identity and social media technologies.

In response to: Can you list any major/significant applications that are leveraging your technology?

What you can see publicly are things like
- mylid.net
- the yadis.org wiki
- our own netmesh.org site

There are enterprise deployments — some of which I can’t talk about yet, but there are some jointly-with-customer slides at netmesh.org

In response to: How do you differ/improve on sxip, sxore, OpenID, etc.?

First, we support the OpenID protocol for authentication, in addition to the LID protocol for authentication, and a number of other identity-related profiles most of which you can find at lid.netmesh.org. And we’ve had a hand in Yadis, which is now implemented by a range of different companies.

We don’t do Sxore etc. because Six Apart etc. are much better positioned to drive this kind of thing than an independent company.

On Sxip, the strategic difference is that we follow a strategy of integrating (e.g. with OpenID etc.) [as opposed to proprietary and closed protocols] [...] On a product side, Sxip is an identity(-only) company, while we consider identity only one layer of three for a larger category that one could call “Web 2.0 platform”.

sxip, openid, yadis, netmesh, johannes ernst, lid, identity, identity management, six apart, web20, web 2.0, social media, visicalc

From the website:

MicroID is a new Identity layer to the web and Microformats that allows anyone to simply claim verifiable ownership over their own pages and content hosted anywhere. The technology is radically simple and capable of empowering new and unique meta services with only minor effort.

In a sense, MicroID is a simple technique to wrap any existing communication identifier in a generic way and enable it to be uniquely and safely published in association with some content. The technique works while protecting privacy and remaining fully decentralized. This applies to owners of sites and pages, and just as importantly, for services that host content generated by users (blog posts, blog comments, forums, videos, account profiles, url lists, friend lists, and so on). These services can add a MicroID to the user’s content (and microformats!) and enable that user to verify to anyone that it is theirs.

There is no new or deep technology involved, simply take a current communication id such as an email address and hash it with the name of the site it will be published on…

A sample hash generator is available, as well as examples of how it can be used to to verify a user’s ownership of web content, user’s membership in a third party site, or to validate a user’s feedback or reputation on a moderated system.

identity, identity architecture, identity assertion, identity management, identity verification, idm, microformats, microid

Beta Systems Launches New Webcast

Beta Systems launches a new webcast titled “Identity Management: Addressing the Growing Pressures of Regulatory Compliance and How Business Imperatives Influence Identity Management Deployments”. The webcast covers many vital areas of identity management, but regulatory compliance is central to the overall message.

The webcast features the following presentations:

• “Identity and Access Management” by Ant Allan, Research VP, Gartner
• “SAM Jupiter: Full Compliance and Fast ROI” by Keith Girt, UK Country Manager, Beta Systems.
• “How is Accenture addressing the Identity Management (IDM) Market?” by Andreas Multari, Manager, Accenture Security Services.

identity, identity management, gartner, beta systems, accenture, identity and access management, compliance, regulatory compliance, idm, webcast

The following is a graph from Technorati showing how often identity management is being mentioned over the last 365 days. Since the first of January there appears to be a significant spike.

graph, graphs, identity, identity management, statistics, technorati

update 11 April 2006: we’re told this event has been cancelled.

New England chapter of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (NEASIS&T) is hosting an event titled Who Am I and How Do You Know For Sure? Identity Management in a Web 2.0 World on Thursday, 20 April 2006 at MIT, Cambridge, MA.

How many times a day do you enter usernames and passwords?
How do you keep track of them all?
How often do you transfer private personal, financial or company data over the web?
How secure do you feel about it?
How well does your organization protect the private information of your consumers?
How much of your identity is “out there” for the taking?
How many times do you ask your consumers to identify themselves each time they use your services?
Do you wish there was a better way?

So do Ben Adida, Dick Hardt and Paul Trevithick­ and they’re working on it. Join the New England chapter of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (NEASIS&T) for an invigorating day with three leading innovators at the forefront of identity and security in today’s giddy environment of promiscuous information exchange over the Web. You will learn what the technological, practical and social challenges are for individuals and organizations in managing logins and the transfer of sensitive data over the web. You will get a sense of the range of initiatives exploring solutions and what the barriers are. You will hear from an academic studying cryptography and the semantic web as they apply to public policy issues like voting and health records (Adida). You will hear from a vendor developing solutions for organizations and individuals (Hardt). And you will hear about efforts to develop open source technology to give users more control over their online identity, profile and relationship information (Trevithick).

NEASIS&T is pleased to present another timely program of leading speakers and panel discussion. Join us!

Dick Hardt’s fame in the identity management world skyrocketed with the popularity of uniquely engaging presentation style. Paul Trevithick is growing famous for his work with Higgins.

Additional information about this event is available on the NEASIS&T website.

ben adida, Cambridge, dick hardt, eclipse, event, hardt, higgins, identity, identity 2.0, identity management, identity20, MA, mit, neasist, Paul Trevithick, sxip, web 2.0, web20, workshop

Educause is hosting CAMP Shibboleth: Enabling Campus and Federated Single Sign-On on June 26–28, 2006 in at the Wyndham Burlington, in Burlington, Vermont.

Unsure about what the Shibboleth System is about and how it can be used in production on your campus? Looking for a Web single sign-on package that can be used both for local applications and in federated environments?

Internet2’s Shibboleth is being deployed nationally and internationally to solve real-world problems associated with intra- and interinstitutional authentication and authorization. For Web-based access control, it leverages campus identity and access management infrastructures to authenticate individuals and then sends information about them to the resource site, enabling the resource provider to make an informed authorization decision.

Many consider the Shibboleth System to be federating software, which it is; however, more and more campuses are asking what value they get, if any, from deploying separate intra- and intercampus single sign-on systems. Increasingly, these campuses are deploying Shibboleth for both purposes. It’s a tool that enables Web authentication and provides authorization information for applications and services, independent of who’s offering them.

This CAMP will offer concrete practice and real-world experience from institutions running Shibboleth in production for controlling access to both on and off-campus services. Featured in this workshop will be an Application Showcase where campuses and vendors will demonstrate the Shibboleth System in action.

Both IT management and technical staff will find sessions of interest on the program and guidance for running Shibboleth in production. Participants will:

CAMP Shibboleth: Enabling Campus and Federated Single Sign-On, June 26-28 in Burlington, Vermont, will give you the opportunity to:

• Learn strategies for managing identity and privilege information used by the Shibboleth System
• Understand the management issues involved in running a Shibboleth-enabled learning management system
• Discover Shibboleth’s value as a campus Web sign-on package
• Learn about SAML 2.0, the mechanism that carries the identity information
• Find out the questions you should ask your information/library vendors about SAML and Shibboleth System support
• Hear practical advice for running the Shibboleth System on server clusters

Participants are encouraged to have a sound knowledge of IdM to learn the most from the sessions. Those interested in knowing more about IdM can review the Enterprise Directory and Authentication Implementation roadmaps.

camp, educause, identity, identity management, idm, middleware, nmi-edit, saml, shibboleth, single-sign on, sso

A concise Single Sign-On definition from NoSheep.net:

Single Sign-On:
One userid, one password, entered one time, with passage allowed from one system to another without interruption

Sometimes there is debate over the meaning of the term, I accept this definition as true, and all further references I make henceforth will be based off this.

definition, identity management, integration, single sign on, sso