#Authentication

I know it took me a while (sorry) but I had a couple things on my plate. At first I wanted to release a more complete integration of OAuth within ASP.NET, but that will have to wait to the next time frame I can allocate to work on this. In the meantime, there is some basic C# code in the OAuth code repository which generates the OAuth signature, which is the most complicated thing to implement in the spec (not that it’s that difficult to implement :-) It’s actually quite easy). [Read More]

After Chris blogged about it Eran Hammer-Lahav wrote a Beginner’s Guide to OAuth I have little to add.

I will add though that my C# library which I’m promising for quite some time will get out very soon :-) (Sorry for the delay, it’s been hectic around here).

Others have made such great explanations as to what OAuth is and what it does like Eran Hammer-Lahav’s post so I won’t repeat it. I will say that OAuth should make the Internet a little bit safer by giving the technical means to remove the need of a certain service asking the user to give his/her username and password to access another service that that user is also using. OAuth is to credentials delegation what OpenID is to authentication. [Read More]

If you are going to install VmWare server (a great and free server virtualization product from VmWare) on Ubuntu Feisty Fawn (7.04) and you’ve followed this post showing how to do it using Canonical’s commercial repository, make sure to read this post at the Ubuntu Community Docs. Basically, if you encounter authentication problems at the Server’s Console after installing the VmWare server and until this bug is fixed, you need to edit /etc/pam. [Read More]

After Passport Windows Live ID and the Liberty Alliance Project now comes Google Account Authentication, which opens up the ability to use anyone’s Google Account to perform authentication to a system. What surprises me in this whole deal is that it seems we are going backwards, back to a “one authentication to rule them all” idea that Microsoft tried to introduce with Passport (errr) Windows Live ID which, as you know, didn’t go quite where they wanted it to be. [Read More]

I’ve just stumbled upon this, which seems to contain some very interesting speculations as to Google’s future plans. They all strengthen my point about in my previous post that Gmail IDs are a Passport like system for authentication and they will be used throughout current and future services. They are already being used in most of Google’s personalization sites. Another thing the link I started with talks about is the fact that Google Talk is also more about managing your contacts and you can see that the integration with Gmail and its Contacts into Google Talk also adds to the fact they it is heading to a more centralized authentication system. [Read More]