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Category: identity

Relying Party: Not That There’s Anything Wrong With That

Published November 14, 2008 by cgerrish

The recent Internet Identity Workshop ended on a high note with many of the participants saying it was one of the best identity events in years. While there many moments of discovery, I had a vaguely uncomfortable feeling about the discussion. In that respect, my feeling was not in sync with the general mood.

I had the opportunity to chat with Kevin Marks, David Recordon and Steve Gillmor about the state of the “Open Stack” and the overall roadmap for OpenID. You can view the conversation on TechCrunchIT. Kevin does a great job of advocating for the Agile / Extreme Programming approach to engineering an open standards approach to “identity.” His approach advocates building the smallest useful piece in an open standard that can inter-operate with the other parts of the open stack. Kevin uses the elegant phrase: “the pieces become composable.” A software engineering project can use the parts that make sense for the task at hand.

While building the “smallest useful piece” allows one to focus on a “do-able task” within the large primordial soup of identity, it does need to unfold within a general roadmap to really be considered “useful.” Recordon offered the observation that no company wants to reveal its product roadmaps. I imagine steps that don’t betray direction.

Becoming an OpenID provider doesn’t really change the status quo. It gives millions of users an OpenID, but not many of them know what that means. Smaller websites becoming relying parties doesn’t change the balance of power. Is the destination a world wide web where I can use my Microsoft credentials to log in to Google? Will we arrive at a place where any credential set can be offered up at any website for the purpose of user authentication. Many small websites are becoming relying parties, not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Users rejected the idea of a single platform providing an identity model for the entire Network. Reviewing the goals and objectives of Hailstorm, it shows a strong resonance with today’s Identity community.

“HailStorm” is designed to place individuals at the center of their computing experience and take control over the technology in their lives and better protect the privacy of their personal information. “HailStorm” services will allow unprecedented collaboration and integration between the users’ devices, their software and their personal data. With “HailStorm”, users will have even greater and more specific control over what people, businesses and technologies have access to their personal information.

“HailStorm” technologies help simplify the way people use technology. Instead of concentrating around a specific device, application, service or network, “HailStorm” services are oriented around people. They give users control of their own data and information, protecting personal information and requiring the consent of the individual with respect to who can access the information, what they can do with it and how long they have that permission to do so.

There’s a sense in which the Open Standards Identity Stack is trying to recreate Mark Lucovsky and Bob Muglia’s vision with composable parts. At the time, no one could parse the language coming out of Microsoft. The concepts couldn’t bridge the gap in trust, and perhaps it was the wrong architecture in which to build that vision. Perhaps Live Mesh will fair better than Hailstorm, this time Microsoft is more in tune with the ocean in which it swims and has embraced the ideas of Open Standards and composable parts within the Network.

The current Identity movement thrives on the ambiguity of the concept. There’s a lot of room to move and therefore a lot of terrain to discover. The more I think about Identity, the more the concept of Difference forces its way into the conversation. Perhaps we call it entropy, change or time; but Differance is at the core of what we call life. And even Identity has Difference hidden within its shadows. The depth of identity does not reside with the proposition A = A; but rather in the idea that A is A. “A” is the “A” that flows through the real-time stream and is utterly changed and somehow still the same.

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Composite Identity: A Collection of Wholes

Published October 14, 2008 by cgerrish

African Masks

Lately I’ve been thinking about identity as a composite. There was a point where I was convinced by the reversal of poles – switching from the system-based identity to the user-centered identity. An individual has many roles and she can reveal whichever identity attributes that are necessary for a particular transaction. We think of these fragments of identity as the pieces that make up the whole. But another way to look at it is to think of identity of a composite of wholes. Some elements match exactly, but live in a different name space. It’s probably not a complete list, or maybe it’s too long, but here’s an an initial take on the modes of identity. Each one could be consider a whole identity.

  • Anonymous
  • Citizen
    • City
    • State
    • Nation
    • Journalist
    • Politician
  • Social
    • Public
    • Private / Restricted
    • Artist/Writer
  • Personal
    • Medical
    • Legal
    • Financial
  • Consumer
    • Public
    • Private / Restricted / VRM
  • Business
    • Employer
    • Employee
    • Contractor
    • Proprietor

If identity is composite, should there be a single control point? If there were to be a single point of access to the management of this identity, authentication would have to be both multi-factor and multi-band.

Should we put all our eggs in one basket? With investment portfolios we preach diversification– we seek assets that don’t correlate in changing markets. It’s called covariance, we don’t want everything to go up or down at the same time. If we can’t risk a single control point, then we need to move to multiple control points. And in fact, even the ownership of identity is in question. We hear a lot about “my data” and “my identity,” but there is no data or identity outside the Network. The idea of multiple control points means more than I control my identity from multiple credential sets, it means I share control of my identity with other entities. The power and political economy of an identity is distributed throughout a network of relations. We don’t live in a frictionless plane, we live as mortals, among mortals, in this world that unfolds around us in the stream of time.

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No Objects w/o Authors: There’s nothing you can do that can’t be done.

Published September 6, 2008 by cgerrish

There was a moment when email became the new file system. Senders, messages and attachments are organized as a sequence of events through time. We write and send a new message; we reply to a received message; we forward a message to someone who should hear.

When we need to save a copy of a document we’ve been working on, we email it to ourselves. As the cost of storage in the cloud approaches zero, it becomes the easiest way to organize information. No need to delete any email ever, no need to stash it away in a hierarchy of folders — search allows everything to be found across the timeline.

There are a number of alternative desktop and file system metaphors that have been proposed. Some of the more interesting ones rely on a history of documents through time as an organic method of organization. Email already accomplishes this transition. Objects in a network are never neutral or natural, their origin can always be traced back to a  human author. Everything you read is written — data is social — it’s by and for the people.

There’s nothing you can do that can’t be done.
Nothing you can sing that can’t be sung.
Nothing you can say but you can learn how to play the game.
It’s easy.

Nothing you can make that can’t be made.
No one you can save that can’t be saved.
Nothing you can do but you can learn how to be you in time.
It’s easy.

– John Lennon

Email is one way that people talk to each other, but there are many other ways we connect through the Network. Searching and Tracking across these multiple streams, coordinating and connecting them is the basis for a new file system.

We don’t like to wait for feedback, because we don’t like the feeling of being misunderstood or left hanging. Real-time web interactions provide immediate feedback to the speaker. The thing that seems the furthest away, the live web, is the thing that is most ordinary in our lives. Someone listens to a speaker and speaks back into the conversation, feeding it and helping it grow. All you need is…

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Digital Identity: Ceremonies of the Mask

Published August 23, 2008 by cgerrish

African Masks

Part of the ceremony of digital identity is binding identity artifacts to the person. There’s a sense in which these artifacts become real extensions of a person. They are augmentations, but the binding is very real. Think about how it feels to lose your keys, your wallet, your favorite pen. The human factors around digital identity remain an undiscovered country.

While listening to Dick Hardt talk about his Firefox plugin Sxipper to Phil Windley on Technometria, I began to think about anonymizers. These services are used to obscure a person entry point into the Network. I can see a future point where our relationship with identity becomes more sophisticated, we could use Sxipper to do three things.

  • Jack into the Network anonymously
  • Manage our personas and roles as we interact with various digital agents on the Network
  • Keep track of common interactions and compile them into macros

Sxipper, or some similar tool, will be on your phone, on your USB fob, a key on your keychain– it becomes your entry point to the Network. There’s a sense in which this relationship is more sophisticated, but at the same time more primitive. We will be consciously donning masks to present ourselves in the social space of the Network. The Network was largely populated by publications and transaction scripts; it’s starting to be populated by people.

Imagine that world, and then imagine losing your keys. The feeling of absence, a part of you gone missing, unmasked. The vows taken in the binding ceremony have been broken.

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