Category: Identity and Privacy

Pat’s Lightbulb

I have the good for­tune to work with Pat Pat­ter­son at Sun and one of the things we dis­cussed quite a lot shortly before I went on mater­nity leave was how to make it easi­er for people to use Liberty pro­to­cols for their iden­tity needs. One of the com­plaints I’ve heard is that there isn’t enough sample code in the world show­ing how to use and imple­ment SAML. Giv­en that Sun­’s Access Man­ager does imple­ment SAML, along with vari­ous oth­er Liberty Alli­ance stand­ards, it seemed like it should be pos­sible to put togeth­er some sample code that uses Access Man­ager. And, giv­en that Access Man­ager is now open source as part of OpenSSO, it made sense to cre­ate anoth­er open source pro­ject. But, this pro­ject should use lan­guages oth­er than Java, to give the LAMP (or MARS) developers and imple­ment­ors some code that they can use, tweak, and fur­ther devel­op. And put back into the pro­ject of course <grin>. I came up with a bunch of use­less names, and Pat came up with Light­bulb (goes with LAMP). Then as I waddled off into mater­nity leave, Pat did the pro­gram­ming and came up with a way to imple­ment a SAML 2.0 ser­vice pro­vider in pure PHP, without even need­ing the OpenSSO or Access Man­ager code. 

Pat’s giv­ing a webin­ar on this tomor­row morn­ing Pacific time; you need to register for it first.

We’re hop­ing that oth­er people will con­trib­ute rel­ev­ant code, in any lan­guage, for people to use when they want to imple­ment or integ­rate SAML cap­ab­il­it­ies into their sys­tems, wheth­er they’re blog­ging sys­tems, wikis, or any­thing else where iden­tity man­age­ment is use­ful. The pro­ject is loc­ated here; it’s easy to join, add a sub-pro­ject, and com­mit some code. Or just browse and see what’s there and what’s use­ful. Have fun!

Liberty Deployments

It’s good to see ana­lysts writ­ing sen­tences like “the Liberty spe­cific­a­tions are res­on­at­ing with major IT user organ­iz­a­tions” (quoted in an InfoWorld art­icle entitled E‑government Group forms with­in Liberty Alli­ance). It shows that the Liberty spe­cific­a­tions (and not just fed­er­a­tion) are being imple­men­ted and deployed.

Which brings me to the main point of this post­ing — if you know of Liberty deploy­ments that are worthy of pub­lic atten­tion, pro­pose them for the Iden­tity Deploy­ment of the Year awards. Nom­in­a­tions close on Monday, August 21st, and the judges are wait­ing to see what you can nom­in­ate! The win­ners will be announced on stage at Digit­al IDWorld. I’m hop­ing we get to see some deploy­ments that are illus­trat­ive of the wide range of prob­lems that Liberty Alli­ance spe­cific­a­tions solve. Paul of course wants a People Ser­vice imple­ment­a­tion to win; are there any cool ones out there that will sway the oth­er judges as well?

Liberty Baby

The Liberty Alli­ance quarterly spon­sors meet­ing was in Van­couver this week, so even though I’m still offi­cially on mater­nity leave, I decided to attend as much as I could (baby allow­ing). It was worth­while going, the baby was a little fussy but slept through enough of the time that I could take part in some of the meet­ing, although I will admit there was one time while I was watch­ing a pre­vi­ously fussy baby lie on the chan­ging mat in the ladies, wav­ing her legs and arms and gurg­ling hap­pily at the sight of the under-basin plumb­ing, when I wondered wheth­er I should be at home instead. That “why am I here” feel­ing passed once she let her­self be put in the sling so I could go back to the meeting.

The Liberty meet­ing itself seemed to go well from what I saw, quite a few people took advant­age of it being opened up to non-mem­bers to observe and par­ti­cip­ate, at least in the meet­ings I was in. It’s always hard for new people to really take part, but I think this exper­i­ment was successful.

The Iden­tity Open­Space meet­ing, jointly pro­duced by the Liberty people and some people from the Inter­net Iden­tity Work­shop, was sched­uled for the Thursday and Fri­day after the Liberty meet­ing. Lots of people stayed over for this, lots more came spe­cific­ally for the meet­ing. I did­n’t see every­one on the list of attendees that I knew, but that’s prob­ably at least in part because the baby melted down in a big way in the early after­noon on Thursday so I had to take her home, and decided mak­ing her take in a fourth day of meet­ings and present­a­tions on Fri­day would be too much for all con­cerned. Still, she slept through Jane Win­n’s Leg­al Basics, lunch, and Robin Wilton’s Pri­vacy and ID Theft before throw­ing her wobbly, so I got to par­ti­cip­ate to some extent.

Jane’s present­a­tion, as usu­al, was ter­rif­ic. She’s quick to grasp the cent­ral points of issues, her talks are always thought-pro­vok­ing and suit­ably cyn­ic­al, and I was glad to be able to attend it, and also glad she took part in the Liberty meet­ing before the IOS event. Robin is also a deep thinker whose blog often por­trays things in a dif­fer­ent way to the gen­er­ally accep­ted dogma; he’s part of the group I’m in at Sun, and I think we’re lucky to have him there.

The IOS did seem to go well from what I saw and heard, bring­ing togeth­er people with dif­fer­ent exper­i­ences, know­ledge, and view­points. Kaliya Ham­lin organ­ised it and ensured people doc­u­mented the ses­sions on the wiki. This goes some way to neg­at­ing one of the chief unavoid­able prob­lems of this format — that there are often things going on in par­al­lel that I’d like to attend.

Kaliya put up a sign encour­aging people to con­trib­ute or learn, or go where they could con­trib­ute or learn, and I hope that those who sat there quietly, not con­trib­ut­ing, will con­trib­ute what they learned some­place else in the future. Iden­tity man­age­ment, with all its rami­fic­a­tions of pri­vacy, secur­ity, and the user exper­i­ence, is a com­plic­ated issue and affects all of us and the more people talk about the issues and try to come togeth­er on solu­tions, the bet­ter. I think this meet­ing helped with that and it’ll be inter­est­ing to see what comes out of it. Right now I’m an out­side observ­er until my mater­nity leave is over but I’m already look­ing for­ward to par­ti­cip­at­ing lots when the baby allows.

Summer Identity

The cur­rent weath­er fore­cast for Van­couver is sunny and warm (into the high 20s; around 80 F) mak­ing it a pretty good place to be right now. All the garden­ers of course are busy turn­ing on the water­ing sys­tems, but giv­en Van­couver also has lots of water this isn’t as much of a prob­lem as in oth­er places. We’re look­ing for­ward to hav­ing a decent sum­mer this year, unlike the last one which was basic­ally miser­able for most of the time.

Which makes Van­couver a pretty good place to be in July: the weath­er is usu­ally superb, sunny and warm but not too hot, life reas­on­ably relaxed, the sea­wall and beaches full but not over­flow­ing. Just the right time of year for stand­ards com­mit­tee meet­ings! I’ve hos­ted DOM WG meet­ings in Van­couver in August, with par­ti­cipants enjoy­ing the com­bin­a­tion of effect­ive work and a bit of tour­ist­ing. If you’re look­ing for an excuse to vis­it Van­couver, now’s your chance — not only is the Liberty Alli­ance hold­ing one of its quarterly spon­sors meet­ings in July (the week of July 17th, to be pre­cise), it’s also hold­ing a con­fer­ence jointly with the Inter­net Iden­tity Work­shop on the Thursday and Fri­day. This will fol­low the stand­ard IIW “uncon­fer­ence” format, to allow for lots of flex­ib­il­ity in top­ics and speak­ers. The attendee list is cer­tainly impress­ive! I’ll be there for as long as the baby lets me (I assume she’ll be the young­est participant).

Liberty Alli­ance non-mem­bers will also be wel­come to attend the Liberty Alli­ance meet­ing itself on Tues­day and Wed­nes­day (NDAs will have to be signed). This is the first time that the Liberty Alli­ance has opened up a spon­sor meet­ing to non-mem­bers in this way; I hope lots of people who are inter­ested in iden­tity issues take the oppor­tun­ity to find out more about what the Liberty Alli­ance does and how it operates.

Regis­tra­tion for both the Open­Space event and the Liberty meet­ing for non-mem­bers is at Iden­tity Open­Space Regis­tra­tion; early-bird regis­tra­tion is now closed but it’s still cheap­er to register now than onsite.

If you want an altern­at­ive set of hotel, res­taur­ant, and tour­ism recom­mend­a­tions, try the North­ern Voice Van­couver page (North­ern Voice is the blog­ging con­fer­ence I help organ­ise each year). The Liberty Alli­ance meet­ing hotel is about a block from the North­ern Voice con­fer­ence location.

BCNet Liberty

Yes­ter­day I gave a talk at the (for­tu­nately) loc­al BCNET/Netera Con­ver­ging Minds Con­fer­ence. BCNet builds net­works for the BC research and edu­ca­tion com­munity, and the con­fer­ence was aimed at the admin­is­trat­ors, deans, and IT man­agers who need to know what tools their research­ers and stu­dents would find use­ful. The con­fer­ence agenda had talks on lots of sub­jects rel­ev­ant to that audi­ence, ran­ging from high per­form­ance com­put­ing, net­work­ing, and secur­ity and iden­tity man­age­ment to advanced media and collaboration.

My talk was about Liberty spe­cific­a­tions, of course. Since I was slot­ted for a 1.5 hour talk, I asked Alex Acton from the Sun Van­couver office to help out. I presen­ted the slides, Alex drove the demos, we got lots of great ques­tions, went 15 minutes over­time and still only got through 29 of the 41 slides. It was prob­ably more use­ful to the audi­ence that way, of course! I like hav­ing a small enough audi­ence that more free-form talk­ing and listen­ing ses­sions are viable. Here are the slides (in PDF format) for pos­ter­ity, includ­ing those I did­n’t get a chance to present.

I had lots of help on cre­at­ing these from Eve, I used demos from Pat and Hubert (Hubert also cre­ated good slides for the recent Liberty web­cast that I could reuse), Scott Can­tor sent me slide decks on Shib­boleth to crib inform­a­tion from, and most of the deploy­ment inform­a­tion comes from Yvonne Wilson’s excel­lent talk at XML 2005. I also used some inform­a­tion from the Liberty tech­no­logy tutori­al. Thanks, everyone!

User-Centric Liberty

The cur­rent buzzword of user-cent­ric iden­tity led some of us at one of the Liberty Alli­ance meet­ings to dis­cuss actu­ally writ­ing down and show­ing how Liberty spe­cific­a­tions could be used to imple­ment user-cent­ric iden­tity sys­tems. One of the out­comes of that dis­cus­sion was a white paper entitled Per­son­al Iden­tity, edited by John Kemp of Nokia (who, incid­ent­ally is also a co-author of the book Mobile Web Ser­vices : Archi­tec­ture and Imple­ment­a­tion), with lots of input from Paul Mad­sen and Car­o­lina Canales Valen­zuela. The oth­er was a demo that Hubert wrote (I did the CSS, so I con­trib­uted some­thing con­crete to the effort along with mor­al sup­port). Hubert wrote up the demo on his blog, at Liberty � la InfoCard (PDF ver­sion of the demo) and A much nicer exper­i­ence… (which has the flash ver­sion of the demo). Now there’s going to be a Liberty Alli­ance web­cast fea­tur­ing both John and Hubert talk­ing about these issues and show­ing the demo. So if you have ques­tions, this would be a good place to find some answers.

Title: User Cent­ric Iden­tity: Suc­cess Today

April 12, 2006 at 8–9 am Pacific Day­light Time

Presenters: John Kemp, Nokia, and Hubert LeVan­Gong, Sun Microsystems

Abstract:

“User-cent­ric iden­tity” has been the latest descrip­tion-de-jour float­ing around in the media, usu­ally used to describe “up and com­ing” new tech­nic­al offer­ings from a vari­ety of entit­ies. But why wait for future unknowns when it’s already hap­pen­ing here and now with Liberty Alli­ance spe­cific­a­tions that have found­a­tion­al ele­ments of user con­sent and pri­vacy? In fact, not only are these spe­cific­a­tions avail­able today, there are products built on them that are also com­mer­cially avail­able today.

Regis­tra­tion is required and lim­ited to the first 100 respond­ents. The present­a­tion will be avail­able in archive form after the event. To register fol­low the steps lis­ted below. This web­cast will be done via Webex. Please con­tact Tri­cia Dehart with any ques­tions, tricia@projectliberty.org.

  1. Go to http://projectliberty.webex.com
  2. Under the head­ing Attend a Meet­ing, click Register
  3. Search for User Cent­ric
  4. Select User Cent­ric Iden­tity: Suc­cess Today and click on the Register button.
  5. Fill out the required inform­a­tion and click Register Now at the bot­tom of the page.