Identity Future

Marc Canter leapt to OpenID’s defense against Michal Migurski’s criticism.

…there are those who think we DON’T need anything more than simple single sign-on. In fact I had lunch with the CEO of SixApart (Barak Berkowitz) who said Brad Fitzpatrick is fairly skeptical of anything beyond his original simple scenario.

But, says Canter, “we need the attribute exchange to make this thing really take off.”

Then all the skeptics will realize that the authentication layer HAD to come first - but was just a first step. Along the way we’ll figure out standards for user intrerface and usage flow.

But for now - the critics are right - OpenID as it stands right now is just authentication and that ain’t gonna rock nobodies world - except for Bard Fitzpatrick’s world - I guess.

attribute exchange, authentication, evolution, marc canter, openid, single sign-on, sso

Marc Hedlund, in an essay at O’Reilly Network, asks:

Who owns your online identity? Do you? Most likely, you don’t — almost all Web sites that have a concept of identity do (and badly want to) maintain an identity profile for each of their users. At the end of the day, that identity belongs to them, not you.

Marc’s question stems from a message he received from Yahoo telling him he had to choose a new username for his My Yahoo account.

In the end, Marc closed his My Yahoo account rather than migrate, and offers this advice:

The lesson should be clear: you cannot entrust your online identity to a business if that identity is meaningful to you. If you want or need your online identity, you must maintain it yourself.

That isn’t to say he thinks there’s no room for a product or service that makes it easier:

There is an opportunity for software businesses that would put identity control directly where it belongs: in the hands of consumers. Some products, such as AdSubtract, already are succeeding by making the Web easier to use while returning control over personal information to users. There are, however, plenty of other uses for a user’s local hard drive, and the successful companies will find a way to combine privacy (which tends not to be a great selling point) with performance and features (each of which do sell).

online identity, idm, identity management, Marc Hedlund, ownership, My Yahoo, self control, self determination, user control

A popular document from March of 2005 which most professionals dealing with identity management are familiar with is Kim Cameron’s: The Laws Of Identity.

From the summary:

Understand the dynamics causing digital identity systems to succeed or fail in various contexts, expressed as the Laws of Identity. Together these laws define a unifying identity metasystem that can offer the Internet the identity layer it needs

It also contains some “words that allow dialogue”, including a definition of digital identity:

We will begin by defining a digital identity as a set of claims made by one digital subject about itself or another digital subject. We ask the reader to let us define what we mean by a digital subject and a set of claims before examining this further.

identity, kim cameron, digital identity, laws of identity

Josh Porter and Alex Barnett got Dick Hardt and Kim Cameron on the line to talk about Identity Management. The result is available as a podcast.

Josh and Alex are big on the attention economy and social software, so they’re asking questions about how IdM works in those contexts. Most people thinking about IdM today seem to be thinking about its uses in the enterprise or in education, but when I say identity management is the next big thing, I mean it in the social context that Josh and Alex are rooted in.

Alex’s notes:

• What are the biggest problems we need to solve for online identity?
   
• The paradox of silos and a single solution
   
• The Laws of Identity and the Sxip protocols
   
• Consistent user experience
   
• Read / Write identity and Attention Data
   
• Separating identity establishment & management and attention & transactional data management
   
• Trading attention data
   
• Attention data and reputational data
   
• Sxore and Blog comment spam and trackbacks are an identity problem
   
• Attention data maintenance
   
• Personally Identifying Information - PII data maintenance
   
• How would ecommerce sites make use of Attention data?
   
• Enterprise-level privacy
   
• Haven’t already we lost our privacy?
   

[cross posted from MaisonBisson.com]

alex barnett, attention economy, dick hardt, identity 2.0, identity management, identity20, idm, josh porter, kim cameron, social software

In a recent report from Research & Consultancy Outsourcing Services (RNCOS) titled “Identity Management Services - A Market Perspective“:

Year 2005 saw an unexpected rise in the incidents of identity theft that stimulated the rapid inclusion of Identity Management Solutions in industries.

In spite of high infrastructure cost, reluctance to adopt a new technology and nonexistence of government support the market for identity management is growing swiftly.

As per industry experts, the market for provisioning, data validation, merged identity solutions and full suites has already reached above $1.2 million. With an average annual growth rate of 2.3 times, it is further estimated to grow above $8.5 billion by the year 2008.

However, factors such as regulatory compliance, higher productivity, improved safety and lower administrative costs might pull businesses towards the Identity Management Solutions, vendors with a standard clientele can only ensure proper implementation of these solutions.

This lends further credibility to statements that identity management is the next big thing.

identity, identity management, growth, market, RNCOS

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