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Information Cards

FastCo Post on Governemnt Experiments with Identity Technologies

Kaliya Young · September 12, 2009 · Leave a Comment

This is cross posted on Fast Company.

The Obama administration open government memorandum called for transparency participation, collaboration and federal agencies have begun to embrace Web 2.0 technologies like blogs, surveys, social networks, and video casts. Today there are over 500 government Web sites and about 1/3 of them require a user name and password. Users need to be able to register and save information and preferences on government Web sites the same way they do today with their favorite consumer sites, but without revealing any personally identifiable information to the government.

Yesterday the United States Government in collaboration with industry announced a few pilot projects using emerging open identity technologies for citizens to use when interacting with government sites. I use the word interacting very deliberately because the government doesn’t want to know “who you are” and has gone great lengths to develop their implementations to prevent citizens from revealing personally identifiable information (name, date of birth etc).

How would you use this?–well imagine you are doing an in depth search on an NIH (National Institute of Health) Web site–and you went back to the site many times over several months. Wouldn’t it be great if the site could “know” it was you and help you resume your search where you left off the last time. Not your name and where you live but just that you were there before.

The Identity Spectrum helps us to understand how it all fits together.

Spectrum of IDAnonymous Identity is on one end of the identity spectrum–basically you use an account or identifier every time go to a Web site–no persistence, no way to connect the search you did last week with the one you did this week.

Pseudonymous Identity is where over time you use the same account or identifier over and over again at a site. It usually means you don’t reveal your common/real name or other information that would make you personally identifiable. You could use the same identifier at multiple sites thus creating a correlation between actions on one site and another.

Self-Asserted Identity is what is typical on the Web today. You are asked to share your name, date of birth, city of residence, mailing address etc. You fill in forms again and again. You can give “fake” information or true information about yourself–it is up to you.

Verified Identity is when there are claims about you that you have had verified by a third party. So for example if you are an employee of a company your employer could issue a claim that you were indeed an employee. You might have your bank verify for your address. etc.

The government pilot is focused on supporting citizens being able to have pseudonymous identities that function only at one Web site–the same citizen interacting with several different government Web sites needs to use a different identifier at each one so their activities across different government agencies do not have a correlation.

It is likely that some readers of this blog know about and understand typical OpenID. Almost all readers of this blog do have an openID whether they know it or not because almost all the major Web platforms/portals provide them to account holders–MySpace, Google, Yahoo!, AOL etc.

So how does this work with OpenID?

Typical OpenIDTypically when logging in with OpenID on the consumer Web you share your URL with the site you are logging into–they redirect you to where that is hosted on the Web–you authenticate (tell them your password for that account) and they re-direct you back to the site you were logging in. (see this slide show for a detailed flow of how this works). Using OpenID this way explicitly links your activities across multiple sites. For example when you use it to comment on a blog– it is known your words come from you and are connected to your own blog.

Using the OpenID with Directed identity–de-links your the identifiers used across different sites but still lets you use the same account to login to multiple sites.

Directed IdentityWhen you go to login to a site you are asked to share not “your URL” but just the name of the site where your account is–Yahoo! or Google or MySpace etc. you are re-directed to that site and from within your account a “directed identity” is created–that is a unique ID just for that Web site. Thus you get the convenience of not having to manage multiple accounts with multiple passwords and you get to store preferences that might be shared across multiple ID’s but you don’t have identifiers that correlate–that are linked across the Web.

How does this work with Information Cards?

This is a complementary open standard to OpenID that has some sophisticated features that allow it to support verified identities along with pseudonymous & self asserted identities. It involves a client-side piece of software called a selector–which selector helps you manage your different identifiers using a card based metaphor, with each digital “card” representing a different one. Citizens can create their own cards OR get them from third parties that validate things about them.

The government is creating a privacy protecting “card profile” to be used in the pilot program. It is NOT issuing identities.

Trust Framework are needed to get it all to work together.

From the press release yesterday:

“It’s good to see government taking a leadership role in moving identity technology forward. It’s also good to see government working with experts from private sector and especially with the Information Card Foundation and the OpenID Foundation because identity is not a technical phenomenon–it’s a social phenomenon. And technological support for identity requires the participation of a broad community and of representatives of government who define the legal framework within which identity will operate,” said Bob Blakley, Vice President and Research Director, Identity and Privacy Strategies, Burton Group. “Today’s announcement supplies the most important missing ingredient of the open identity infrastructure, mainly the trust framework. Without a trust framework it’s impossible to know whether a received identity is reliable.”

The OpenID Foundation and Information Card Foundation wrote a joint white paper to describe how they are working on developing this. From the abstract:

[They] are working with the U.S. General Services Administration to create open trust frameworks for their respective communities.

These frameworks, based on the model developed by the InCommon federation for higher education institutions, will enable government Web sites to accept identity credentials from academic, non-profit, and commercial identity providers that meet government standards. These standards are critical as they represent the government’s resolution of the challenging and often competing issues of identity, security, and privacy assurance. Open trust frameworks not only pave the way for greater citizen involvement in government, but can enable even stronger security and privacy protections than those typically available offline.

These are all exciting developments but there is much more to do.

Looking (far) ahead there may be the opportunity to do selective disclosure–combining anonymity with verified identity.

How do these go together–you can take a verified identity claim say your birth date then using cryptography strip the specifics away and just have a claim that says you are “over 21”. Then using an anonymous identifier you have selectively disclosed your age without giving away your date of birth.

You could imagine this would be handy for citizens wanting to communicate their opinions to their member of congress without revealing their actual name and address – they could “prove” using a verified claim they live in the district but not reveal who they are. This aspect of what is possible with the technology is VERY forward looking and will take many years to get there. There is enormous potential to evolve the Web with this emerging identity layer.

I would like to invite all of you interested in being involved/learning more to attend the Internet Identity Workshop in Mountain View California November 3-5. I have been facilitating this event since its inception in 2005. It is truly amazing to see how far things have progressed from when we were 75 idealistic technologist talking about big ideas. at the Hillside Club in Berkeley. It is also some what daunting to think about how much farther we have to go.

Open Identity for Open Government Explained

Kaliya Young · September 9, 2009 · 7 Comments

Today the United States Government with digital identity industry leaders announced the development of a pilot project with NIH and related agencies using two of the open identity technology standards OpenID and Information Cards.
This is, as a friend said to me, a “jump the shark moment” – these technologies are moving out from their technologists technology cave into mainstream adoption by government agencies. We are seeing the convergence of several trends transform the way citizens participate in and communicate with government:

  • Top-down support for open government
  • The proliferation of social media
  • The availability of open identity technologies

The Obama administration open government memorandum called for transparency participation, collaboration and federal agencies have begun to embrace Web 2.0 technologies like blogs, surveys, social networks, and videocasts.
Today there are over 500 government websites and about 1/3 of them require a user name and password. Users need to be able to register and save information and preferences on government websites the same way they do today with their favorite consumer sites, but without revealing any personally identifiable information to the government.
The challenge is that supporting this kind of citizen interaction with government via the web means that identity needs to be solved. On the one hand you can’t just ask citizens to get a new user-name and password for all the websites across dozens of agencies that they log in to. On the other you also can’t have one universal ID that the government issues to you and works across all government sites. Citizens need a way to interact with their government pseudonymously & in the future in verified ways.
So how will these technologies work?
Those already familiar with OpenID know that typically when users login with it they give their own URL – www.openIDprovider.com/username. (see this slideshare of mine if you want to see OpenID 101) There is a little known part of the OpenID protocol called directed identity – that is a user gives the name of their identity provider – Yahoo!, Google, MSN etc – but not their specific identifier. The are re-directed to their IdP and in choosing to create a directed identity they get an identifier that is unique to the site they are logging into. It will be used by them again and again for that site but is not correlatable across different websites / government agencies. The good news is it is like having a different user-name across all these sites but since the user is using the same IdP with different identifiers (unlinked publicly) but connected to the same account they just have to remember one password.
Information Cards are the new kids on the identity block in a way – this is their first major “coming out party” – I am enthusiastic bout their potential. It requires a client-side tool called a selector that stores the user’s “digital cards”. Cards can be created by the end user OR third parties like an employer, financial institution, or school can also issue them.

In essence, this initiative will help transform government websites from basic “brochureware” into interactive resources, saving individuals time and increasing their direct involvement in governmental decision making. OpenID and Information Card technologies make such interactive access simple and safe. For example, in the coming months the NIH intends to use OpenID and Information Cards to support a number of services including customized library searches, access to training resources, registration for conferences, and use of medical research wikis, all with strong privacy protections.

Dr. Jack Jones, NIH CIO and Acting Director, CIT, notes, “As a world leader in science and research, NIH is pleased to participate in this next step for promoting collaboration among Assurance Level 1 applications. Initially, the NIH Single Sign-on service will accept credentials as part of an “Open For Testing” phase, with full production expected within the next several weeks. At that time, OpenID credentials will join those currently in use from InCommon, the higher education identity management federation, as external credentials trusted by NIH.” In digital identity systems, certification programs that enable a site — such as a government agency — to trust the identity, security, and privacy assurances from an identity provider are called trust frameworks. The OIDF and ICF have worked closely with the federal government to meet the security, privacy, and reliability requirements set forth by the ICAM Trust Framework Adoption Process (TFAP), published on the IDManagement.gov website. By adopting OpenID and Information Card technologies, government agencies can cost effectively serve their constituencies in a more personalized and user friendly way.

“It’s good to see government taking a leadership role in moving identity technology forward. It’s also good to see government working with experts from private sector and especially with the Information Card Foundation and the OpenID Foundation because identity is not a technical phenomenon — it’s a social phenomenon. And technological support for identity requires the participation of a broad community and of representatives of government who define the legal framework within which identity will operate,” said Bob Blakley, Vice President and Research Director, Identity and Privacy Strategies, Burton Group. “Today’s announcement supplies the most important missing ingredient of the open identity infrastructure, mainly the trust framework. Without a trust framework it’s impossible to know whether a received identity is reliable.”

Under the OIDF and ICF’s open trust frameworks, any organization that meets the technical and operational requirements of the framework will be able to apply for certification as an identity provider (IdP). These IdPs can then supply authentication credentials on behalf of their users. For some activities these credentials will enable the user to be completely anonymous; for others they may require personal information such as name, email address, age, gender, and so on. Open trust frameworks enable citizens to choose the identity technology, identity provider, and credential with which they are most comfortable, while enabling government websites to accept and trust these credentials. This approach leads to better innovation and lower costs for both government and citizens.

The government is looking to leverage industry based credentials that citizens already have to provide a scalable model for identity assurance across a broad range of citizen and business needs – doing this requires a trust framework to assess the trustworthiness of the electronic credentials; see Trust Framework Provider Adoption Process (TFPAP).   A Trust Framework Provider is an organization that defines or adopts an online identity trust model involving one or more identity schemes, has it approved by a government or community such as ICAM, and certifies identity providers as compliant with that model. The OIDF and ICF will jointly serve as a TFP operating an Open Trust Framework as defined in their joint white paper, Open Trust Frameworks for Open Government.
Both the OpenID and Information Card Foundation have been working very hard on this for many months – last night I was fortunate to their boards at a history first ever joint dinner.
There are two women in particular though who have driven this forward: Judith Spencer of the Federal Identity, Credential, and Access Management Committee on the government side and Mary Ruddy of Meristic Inc on the industry side. Both of them will be speaking about the project at the Gov 2.0 Summit on Thursday.
Personally this announcement shows how far things have come since I facilitated the first Internet Identity Workshop in 2005 with 75 idealistic identity technologies talking about big ideas for use-centric identity. I am really looking forward to discussing these developments at the forthcoming 9th Internet Identity Workshop in November.

Celebrating with OIDF & ICF

Kaliya Young · September 8, 2009 · Leave a Comment

This evening I was fortunate enough to be invited to attend the joint OpenID and Information Card Foundation dinner. It was fun to connect with everyone and it really meant a lot to me to be there. It has been a long journey as a community since the first Internet Identity Workshop in Oct 2005.

IIW IX is open for business

Kaliya Young · August 27, 2009 · 1 Comment


Iiw9_4.png

Internet Identity Workshop number 9 is coming up in about 10 weeks. November 3-5 (Tuesday to Thursday) in Mountain View California at the Computer History Museum.

We are excited about all the developments in the industry with protocol evolution in the social web space AND larger and larger scale deployments of open identity technologies including OpenID and Information Cards.

There will be much to talk about at this fall’s event.

Early REGISTRATION is Open! UNTIL SEPTEMBER 16 then prices go up by $50-75

Early Bird Prices are….

  • $274 regular tickets
  • $148 for independents
  • $ 50 for students

We need to get 75 people registered by September 16 to make a final confirmation for our conference space at the Computer History Museum.

Special this year we have the “BIG” ticket for those can expense $998 (but can’t convince marketing to sponsor). This is a GREAT way to support IIW!

IIW is a completely community driven event – we don’t pay anyone for marketing – the community is our marketing.

Please put our LOGO ON our blog our WEBSITE.

Follow IIW on Twitter – @idworkshop

SPONSORSHIP OPPORTUNITIES ARE STILL AVAILABLE!!! Please contact Phil if you are interested in learning more phil@windley.org

JOIN THE COMMUNITY MAILING LIST

THE INVITATION TO IIW!

The Internet Identity Workshop focuses on “user-centric identity” and netizen empowerment on the social web trying to solve the technical challenge of how people can manage their own identity and social activity across the range of websites, services, companies and organizations that they belong to, purchase from and participate with.

This is where everyone from a diverse range of projects doing the real-work of making this vision happen gather and work intensively for three days. It is the best place to meet and participate with all the key people and projects. This is a comprehensive list of the technology communities that are covered.

The event does not have a pre-set agenda instead as people register they are asked what they would like to present about, learn and discuss with peers/industry experts. These are all collected here . The first morning of the conference will be introductory orientation about key projects and technologies in the community. After that the community creates the agenda itself using the Open Space Method. Dinner both Tuesday and Wednesday are a big part of the conference.

Here are links to notes that cover most of the sessions from the last two conferences IIW #8 spring of 2009     IIW #7 fall of 2008

These documents are great resources for convincing your boss of the value of this event.

The heart of the workshop is a practical idealism in working towards the shared vision of a decentralized, user-oriented identity layer for the Internet.

Because the web was built around “pages”, no tools or standards were created to control how the information about you was collected or used. At the Internet Identity Workshop we bring the people creating these tools and standards so people can safely manage their online identity and control their personal data.

It is not about any one technology – rather it is a place to discuss multiple interoperating (and possible competing) projects, standards, and networks for identity, data sharing, and reputation.

As part of Identity Commons, the Internet Identity Workshop creates opportunities for both innovators and competitors. We provide an open forum for both the big guys and the small fry to come together in a safe and balanced space.

There are a wide range of projects in the community:

  • Open conceptual, community, and governance models.
  • Open standards and protocols.
  • Open source projects.
  • Commercial projects.
  • Projects to address social and legal implications of these technologies.
  • Efforts to rethink the business models and opportunities available with these new technologies.

User-centric identity is the ability:

  • To use one’s identifier(s) on more than one site
  • To control who sees what information about you
  • To selectively share presence and profile information
  • To maintain multiple identities and personas in the contexts you wish
  • To aggregate attention, navigation, and purchase history from the sites and communities you frequent
  • To move and share your personal data, relationships, documents, and other publications as you wish

All of the following are active topic areas at each IIW:

  • Improving Existing Legal Constructs Privacy Policies Terms of Service
  • Creating New Legal Constructs – Limited Liability Personas, Identity Rights Agreements
  • Creating New Business Models – Identity Oracle, I-Brokers
  • New Citizenship Perspectives – Activism Community, Event Coordination, Community Identity and Data Sharing

The Internet Identity Workshop (IIW) was founded in the fall of 2005 by Phil Windley, Doc Searls and Kaliya Hamlin. IIW is a working group of Identity Commons The event has been a leading space of innovation and collaboration amongst the diverse community working on user-centric identity.

Identity for Online Community Managers

Kaliya Young · August 19, 2009 · Leave a Comment

I was asked by Bill Johnson of Forum One Networks to kick off the discussion on the next Online Community Research Network call this week with the topic Identity for Online Community Managers – drawing on the presentation that I put together for the Community 2.0 Summit. I cover the basics of how OpenID, OAuth and Information Cards work, who is “in” terms of supporting the projects and what community managers/platforms can do. We will discuss the implications of these new identity and data sharing protocols on the call.

Online Identity for Community Managers: OpenID, OAuth, Information Cards

View more documents from Kaliya Hamlin.
I will also be attending the Online Community Summit in October Sonoma and will be sharing about these and other technologies there.

ID biz models "in the future maybe" says Johannes

Kaliya Young · August 18, 2009 · Leave a Comment

Johanne Ernst is a builder of Identity technologies (and one of the clearest thoughtful thinkers about identity technologies and markets. He just posted a great post about business models in the identity space. I know he has at various times tried raise money as an entrepruner in this space – so he has thought a lot about the business models.

For those of you who don’t know Johannes he developed Light-Weight Identity (LID) a URL based ID system at the same time Brad Fitzpatrick did at Live Journal and then participated in merging it all together into YADIS discovery which became woven together with OpenIDv1, XRI/i-names  and sxip to become OpenIDv2. He also was the first drawer of the identity triangle (OpenID, SAML, InfoCards) which evolved into the Venn of Identity.

Many people have ideas for value-added services that could be sold once sufficiently many users used internet identities at enough sites. The trouble is that the transaction volume for OpenID (or any other identity technology on the internet) is still far too low to make this viable.

The mot important sentence is this one – Let’s not confuse being majorly annoyed how long this is all taking (speaking about myself here) with something being fundamentally wrong (because there isn’t).

I take heart with what he has to say especially because he addresses it to a big part of what I do – organize (un)conferences to continue momentum for the field.

From his post:

Value-added services:
Many people have ideas for value-added services that could be sold once sufficiently many users used internet identities at enough sites. The trouble is that the transaction volume for OpenID (or any other identity technology on the internet) is still far too low to make this viable.

So the verdict here is: perhaps in the future.   

So what’s an analyst, or conference organizer, or entrepreneur, or venture capitalist to do?

My take: Hang in there, keep the burn rate low, make no major moves, would be my advice. (Believe it or not, sometimes I’m being asked about my advice on this.) All the signs are pointing in the right direction, the latest being Google’s major OpenID push. Let’s not confuse being majorly annoyed how long this is all taking (speaking about myself here) with something being fundamentally wrong (because there isn’t).

Sooner or later, at least the value-added services opportunity will emerge. Perhaps others. But so far it has not yet.

Great Identity News

Kaliya Young · August 11, 2009 · Leave a Comment

Yesterday the Government hosted a workshop in DC: Open Government Identity Management Solutions Privacy Workshop.
The OpenID Foundation and the Information Card Foundation are working with the U.S. General Services Administration to create open trust frameworks for their respective communities.
Drummond Reed and Don Tibeau announced their paper Open Trust Frameworks for Open Government.
Quiet and intense work has been going on since just before the last IIW on all this, so it is great to see it begin to see the light of day.
The OpenID Foundation had a wonderful new redesign that Chris Messina announced. This page really made me smile: Get an OpenID – Surprise! You may already have an OpenID.
Axel did a Wordle of it:

Announcing the Internet Identity Workshop (IIW2005)

Kaliya Young · August 1, 2005 · Leave a Comment

There’s been considerable conversation around identity on the Internet, or what some would call grassroots identity. Providing identity services between people, websites, and organizations that may or may not have any kind of formalized relationship is a different problem than providing authentication and authorization services within a single organization. Many have argued that the lack of a credible identity infrastructure will eventually result in the Internet being so overrun with fraud as to make it useless for many interesting uses.
To solve this problem, or pieces of it, companies and individuals have made a variety of architectural and governance proposals. Some of these include:

  • The Liberty Alliance
  • Microsoft’sInfoCardsystem
  • Identity Commons
  • SXIP
  • OpenID
  • LID
  • XRI/XDI(i-names)
  • Passel

Myself, Phil Windley, Drummond Reed, and Doc Searls are hosting the Internet Identity Workshop in Berkeley on October 25 and 26th to provide a forum to disucss these and other architectural and governance proposals for Internet-wide identity services and their underlying philosophies. The workshop will comprise a day of presentations on Internet-scale identity architectures followed by a day of structured open space to accommodate the range of topics and issues that will emerge from day one and other issues and identity services that do not fit into the scope of the formal presentations. We’re hoping that adding a little more formality to the conversation will aid in digesting some of the various proposals.
We’re inviting presentations for the first day on the following topics:

  • Problems, issues, politics, and economics or Internet-scale identity systems.
  • Architectures for Internet-scale identity systems
  • Philosophies that drive architectural decisions in these systems (see Kim Cameron’s Laws of Identity for an example of such a philosophy

If you’d like to present on some other topic, drop one of us a line first and we’ll see how it fits in. Prospective presenters will be asked to submit a 250-300 word abstract. We hope to accomodate everyone, but we may end up picking from the abstracts.
I’m excited about this and looking forward to it. I hope we can have a good set of presentations the first day and a solid day of discussion the second. If you’re interested in this sort of thing, I hope to see you there. Please read the full announcement for some other details and register if you’re coming. There is a $75 charge to cover the cost of the venue, administrative expenses, and the cost of snacks and lunch both dats.

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