The OSIS working group of the Identity Commons is completing their third interop. In OSIS-speak, an interop is a set of features and a time period where many projects and vendors test with others’ components to ensure that user-centric identity systems actually work together. Interops have always been concluded with one or more public demonstrations of the progress. It’s been greatly expanded this time with many more participants and test cases. We had demos for 2 days at the RSA conference, and will be showing more at the European Identity Conference in Munich next week.One part of this interop that I think is most significant is that we have are testing some features that are particularly useful in enterprise identity management scenarios. In my sessions and in discussing the OSIS interop at RSA, I found that many people were not aware of some of these capabilities.

For example, managed information cards can be issued in auditing or non-auditing mode. In auditing mode, the identity provider knows who the relying party is and can control if and what data is securely sent to the Relying Party. In non-auditing (or privacy) mode the identity provider does not know where the data is to be sent — and hence cannot audit or change what data is sent based on that knowledge.

The capabilities of auditing and non-auditing cards exactly fit with some enterprise use cases I have experienced. It’s almost like they were designed with those use cases in mind. In fact, I remember hearing Kim Cameron and Mike Jones describe these modes at the very first Internet Identity Workshop in 2005, for just such use cases. Now it’s great to see them implemented and working — and it’s very cool to see it first in 100% open source implementations.

To see how auditing information cards could be used in an enterprise scenario, the Bandit project put together a live demo for Brainshare. It’s still operational and we continue to use these sites for OSIS testing. Check out the demo overview, instructions and links for more detail.

The quick overview of sites and services:

• We added to our existing Bandit Cards identity provider the ability for users to be issued auditing and non-auditing cards.
• We deployed a community identity provider
• Various other sites that illustrate how identity information can be appropriately used and managed.

More information about Bandit Employee Cards, and Bandit Member cards from the demo information page about the Bandit Cards IdP:

This is an instance of the Bandit Identity Provider. It is the repository of user account information, and (for purposes of this demo) represents a corporate identity source. It issues a number of types of information cards:

• An Employee Card. This card could be used to access information that should only be used in corporate approved sites, therefore Employee cards are issued in auditing mode. All uses of the card (each time a token is retrieved) are audited and the destination site for the token is recorded. If the card is attempted to be used at an unapproved site, no token is issued.
• A Member Card. This card is not used to access sensitive corporate identity data, it can be used to get member discounts at various sites. It essentially conveys a token which states that the bearer is an member.

Another site is the Bandit Blog. The intent is that only holders of Bandit Employee Cards should be able to post to the blog.

We also instantiated an identity provider service that is intended to represent a community site, The Identity Paparazzi. It issues non-auditing cards to it’s members. They like to post photos to a hypothetically contentious photo sharing site called “Identerati Exposé“.

Hence, in our twisted little hypothetical minds we could see some scenarios.

(Note: use “view image” to see more detail in the following diagrams, and the photos above)

We should be able to guarantee that the Bandit Employee card could only be used at sites approved by the identity provider (Bandit Cards). The data would not be rejected by the rogue Exposé site, so if the user attempts to present their Employee card at the Exposé site, the operation must rejected at the IdP/STS. However, a Bandit Employee card should allow the user to post to the Bandit blog site. All uses of the Employee card should be audited.

A Bandit Employee, on their own time, should be able to be a card carrying member of the Identerati Paparazzi and post photos to Identerati Exposé. Identerati Paparazzi cards should allow the user to post photos to the Identerati Exposé site, but be rejected if used to post to the Bandit Blog site.

All of these demo systems are in place and have been working in many instances for months. When you actually start using the cards as described, it’s rather intuitive.

Try it out!

Anyone can be a Bandit Employee — just create an account in Bandit Cards and issue yourself an employee card (when getting a card there is a drop-down list of card types). Unfortunately, being a self-asserted Bandit employee does not mean you get paid. Likewise you can be an Identerati Paparazzi.

So feel free to try it yourself, but please be aware that is software under active development. Some things are bound not to work. For more information or help we have mailing lists, IRC channels, bug reporting systems.

Earlier this year there were a number of interesting comments from Eric Norlin and Dave Kearns about the term “user-centric”. Since reading those comments I have become more aware of some ambiguous meanings ascribed to the term. I definitely agree that “user-centric” is unproductive as some sort of vague mantra — though I also believe that we should be aware of what values are enabled or enforced by the code we produce. What would be most useful now would be to focus on what user-centric identity systems actually do for users and companies.

Along those lines, at Novell’s Brainshare conference there was a panel discussion about “Open Source and User-centric Identity in the Enterprise”. The discussion was moderated by Carolyn Ford, and included Kim Cameron, Pamela Dingle, Patrick Harding, and myself. A video of the session is available (though there are technical difficulties and the guy on the far right looks like a complete dork).

Before we could discuss how user-centric identity systems may or may not be useful in the enterprise, we needed to get some idea of what we mean by “user-centric”. That was the opening question to the panel. Since audio is not clear in the recording, I thought I would write up some of what I may have said.

I see three possible ways that an identity system could be thought of as “user-centric”.

1. User as source of identity data

The user is the authoritative source of self-asserted identity data. Duh. This may sound circular, but it is helpful to contrast it with the next statement. Network services are not authoritative for self-asserted data — yet they currently often handle such data as if they were.

I have read articles where this meaning for user-centric identity is used to explain why it is of no value to the enterprise. The conclusion is that self-asserted data is of no value in enterprise systems. The implication sequence is: self-asserted => ability to lie => untrustworthy => low assurance => no business value. But this reasoning is overly simplistic. Users are authoritative for some information, e.g. their password, or their home address, or any information related to their intent as an employee within a business transaction.

Note that authoritative depends on the context. A self-asserted shipping address may be good enough for some network services and not others. Anything that a user puts in forms now is self-asserted data and currently accepted as authoritatve within that context. I hate forms and I want a system to help me with them.

So user-centric could mean helping users manage self-asserted identity data.

2. User as control point for release of identity data.

In this perspective, the user may not assert the identity data — but has a vested interest in where it is released. I may not determine my social security number, or my credit score, but I care to whom that information is given. In this view, identity data is more like a controlled substance and the user is an active participant in it’s distribution.

For example, information card systems allow for assertions of identity data to be securely transmitted from an authoritative source to a network service in such a way that the user cannot tamper or see the data, yet is a control point for the release of the data.

Managed information cards can also be issued in auditing or non-auditing mode. In auditing mode, the identity provider knows where the identity data is to be sent and can control if and what data is securely sent. In non-auditing mode the identity provider does not know where the data is to be sent, which also has valid use cases. In either case, the identity provider is authoritative for the information, but the user in the center has a valid interest in controlling where the data is released as well.

So user-centric could mean helping users appropriately manage the dissemination of information about them.

3. User as center of their identity world

Yet another aspect is that user-centric could mean that only the user can corelate all of their accounts. In this view, user-centric is opposed to a central repositories for general identification of users. Only the user knows she is LacrosseMom to one service, acct 345678 in another service, and Sally in a third service.

So user-centric could mean the user is only point of linkage between some identity sources.

All of these perspectives are useful, and they are all useful within the enterprise, outside of the enterprise, and especially when crossing such boundaries.

For me, I think the 1st and 3rd perspectives are important, but the 2nd perspective is the most interesting and significant for current system development.

If you read only one blog post this week, or this month, I recommend this one from Pamela Dingle. I know it’s long, but it is well worth it to read the whole thing. Multiple times.

My favorite lines:

We need a way for communities to form and flourish and decay that is organic. To that end, if you were to ask me what the vision is for any technology that follows the Identity Provider paradigm, I would say that the “why” is so that we can make a system where communities can interact, transact, and relate to each other without the tech getting in the way. This is the ultimate end goal for me – if I didn’t believe that we can build a much better house, I certainly wouldn’t spend so much time perfecting the engineering on a radically new foundation.

I couldn’t agree more.

If I wanted to get tangled up in public debate, I think that Jackson Shaw, Dave Kearns, Kim Cameron, Jeff Bohren, Eve Maler, Phil Hunt and other identity bloggers would be some of that last people with whom I would I want to argue.

Then again, I do have a different point view that I have not seen explicitly stated. So here it goes…

I really tried to stay out of the meta vs. virtual directory conversation and I think it’s mostly blown over now, but I think none of the above bloggers mentioned one particular aspect of meta/virtual/directories that is relevant and important. In fact, I think there is a crucial limitation of meta and virtual directories that is leading us to the next phase of identity systems. The limitation is the political result of use of those tools. Meta/virtual/directories have valid uses within a single area of control — at least control of the central service — but they are still political silos. The notion of a hub or silo is great within a particular scope, but is a limitation when moving beyond that scope.

I think it was Eric Norlin that started the bus blog-thread by quoting Stuart Kwan’s use of the phrase “identity bus”. At first I thought the phrase was completely unnecessary. As I have read more and more posts and articles that echoed the phrase and saw how it resonates with people, I just wish I had thought of it. Stuart Kwan. Hip Internet terminologist. Who knew?

I think an identity bus would be similar to a message bus — a system that allows for loose coupling between a number of message publishers and consumers in sequence where there is no single point of control. That’s what we’ve been working on for years in the identity metasystem. Many people have recognized the need for it, so there are many terms. Years ago, my colleague Steve Carter referred to it as crafted identity tokens moving across an identity fabric. John Clippinger has called it the missing layer of the Internet. Kim Cameron calls it the backplane of the identity metasystem. Dick Hardt calls it Identity 2.0. All are fine terms. What is important to me is that it is a system that allows for loose coupling between identity data publishers and consumers in sequence where there is no single point of administrative control. It’s a way of passing identity data between a number of control points. It is explicitly about moving beyond hub tools like meta/virtual/directories.

Dave and Kim combined Eric’s post about the identity bus with a comment from Jackson about metadirectories. After that Dave, Kim, et al., exchanged very pleasant posts representing strongly contrasting viewpoints about meta directories and virtual directories. Kim likes meta directories (as would be expected) and Dave likes virtual directories. Both have long histories of preferring their respective technologies. Dave maintains that virtual directories are nimble and lightweight, whereas meta directories are large, cumbersome, and slow. In my experience, both meta and virtual directories are very useful tools within a particular administrative area or hub — i.e. an area where an particular political entity such as an IT dept of a corporation controls a central service that disseminates identity information.

Meta directories synchronize the identity data from multiple sources via a push or pull protocols, configuration files, etc. They are useful for synchronizing, reconciling, and cleaning data from multiple applications, particularly systems that have their own identity store or do not use a common access mechanism to get their identity data. Many of those applications will not change, so synchronizing with a metadirectory works well.

Virtual directories are useful to pull identity data through the hub from various sources dynamically when an application requests it. This is needed in highly connected environments with dynamic data, and where the application uses a protocol which can be connected to the virtual directory service. I am also well aware that virtual directory fans will want to point out that the authoritative data source is not the service itself, but my point here is that, if the owners shut down the central service, applications can’t access the data. It’s still a political hub.

Personally, I think all this meta and virtual stuff are useful additions to THE key identity hub technology — directory services. When it comes to good old-fashioned, solid scalable, secure directory services, I even have a personal favorite. But I digress.

The key point here as I see it is ‘hub’ vs. ‘bus’ — a central hub service vs. passing identity data between services along the bus.

The meta/virtual/directory administration and configuration is the limiting problem. In directory-speak, the meta/virtual/directory must support the union of all schema of all applications that use it. That means it’s not the mass of data, or speed of synchronization that’s the problem — it’s the political mass of control of the hub that becomes immovable as more and more applications rendezvous on it.

A hub is like the proverbial silo. In the case of meta/virtual/directories the problem goes beyond the inflexibility of large identity silos like Yahoo and Google — those silos support a limited set of very tightly coupled applications. In enterprise deployments, many more applications access the same meta/virtual/directory service. As those applications come and go, new versions are added, some departments are unwilling to move, the central service must support the union of all identity data types needed by all those applications over time. It’s not whether the service can technically achieve this feat, it’s more an issue of whether the application administrators are willing to wait for delays caused by the political bottleneck that the central service inevitably becomes.

More and more we are seeing applications that do not fit within a single administrative area. Even within medium-sized corporations there are almost always renegade departments, divisions in different countries or jurisdictions, outsourcing of employee services. The perimeter continues to dissolve. We can say that these applications are more distributed, not in the technology sense, but in the sense of administrative control. The application itself may not be distributed, but it needs to understand identity information from administrative areas outside of it’s own.

To me, this fits very well the notion of an identity bus — like a message passing bus. Not a hub. It needs to be a chain or channel where a particular chunk of identity data (e.g. a token) can be passed through, and potentially acted on, by multiple administrative control points. Most emerging identity systems support some notion of passing tokens or assertions between identity domains for this reason. For example, information cards does this via chaining of tokens through multiple security token services, orchestrated by the client. I think this is particularly powerful in the RP/STS scenario.

As Dave points out, I will be on his panel at the European Identity Conference, and I suspect these issues may come up. I was so looking forward to a peaceful time in Munich, now I think I may get roasted. Should be interesting.