#Distributed Identity

There is a lot of buzz about Sun’s announcement of OpenID support and the fact that Sun will be giving OpenIDs for all of its employees. While this is indeed good news for the identity community in general and for the OpenID community specifically, it got me thinking about the implications for such a move in which a big company OpenID enables all of its employee. If a company OpenID enables all of its employees and its OpenID server is usable for outside parties to authenticate against it means that now every employee of that company, when authenticating with his/her OpenID can be verified as an employee of that company (providing that no one spoofs the domain and DNS settings, etc). [Read More]

I’m probably the last person to talk about it, by myOpenID.com has a cool and slick new design [via Scott’s blog]. They also added a cool new feature, client side certificate, so when you install such a certificate on your machine you don’t need to do anything to sign in. It does all that for you! Just remember to NOT use it on public computers or on computers that are being used by more than one person and do not have a different user names for each person. [Read More]

Dave Winer says: “[…] we could make Twitter the open identity system we’ve been looking for. Make your Twitter ID the one that you use to log on to other service […]” I say let Twitter support OpenID with all of the good Relaying Party Best Practices including (but not limited to): Ability to associate an existing account with an OpenID Ability to switch to another OpenID (sort of a password recovery for OpenID) Ability to create a new account directly with an external (non Twitter) OpenID (be a standard relaying party) If they want to, they can also be an OpenID provider (which should be good for them, of course ;-) ). [Read More]

One of the advantages of OpenID is that it enabled you, the user, to consolidate various accounts on various web sites into one (or more, if you have more than one OpenID) identity. Of course you get the side benefit of having only one login and password to use, but for the sake of this argument, that’s a side effect :-) . This is a choice that was never available prior to OpenID, and when it does exist in the form of Google Accounts/Yahoo BBAuth/Microsoft Passport Live ID it allows you access to the provider’s web sites and assets and a handful of 3rd party sites that supports that vendor’s authentication protocol. [Read More]

Most sites today distinguish between the process of Signing Up – the user wants to register to the site/service and does not have a previous account (or wishes to create another account), and the process of Signing In – the user wishes to identify himself/herself with an already existing account on the site/service. Whenever I reach a site that support OpenID I always try to see what is the process of sign-in/up with OpenID to the site/service. [Read More]

I just read this post by Kaliya and it got me thinking about Identity relationships. I think Kaliya is right that the connection between identity and relationships between identities (a.k.a. Social Networks) is a hot topic which will probably get some answers in 2007 (hopefully even good ones). What if we could have relationships between identities (between OpenID identities, for example)? We could store them as part of our identity (I’m sure we can think of a creative use of XFN and identities like OpenID since it is also a distributed way of showing relationships between people) and “take our friends with us” to other sites that we sign up, eliminating the need to manually re-enter and “drag” our friends to every hot new social networking site. [Read More]