My good friend Vittorio is one of the most gifted technology presenters - an artist!  But he’s also a talented engineer and architect - the rat!  Vittorio has been a great supporter of minimal disclosure.  I want to point you to his nice little guide to the minimal disclosure videos…  None of Vittorio’s real-time cartoons this time, but I hope they’re coming…

“As is customary by now, the IdElement is providing extensive coverage of the U-Prove CTP:

Announcing Microsoft’s U-Prove Community Technical PreviewStefan describes U-Prove, some typical scenarios where traditional technologies fall short while U-Prove provides a solution, and a summary of what we are releasing.
	U-Prove CTP: a Developers’ PerspectiveChristian and Greg explore the CTP, clarifying U-Prove’s role in the Identity Metasystem and describing how ADFSv2, WIF and CardSpace have been extended in the CTP for accommodating U-Prove’s functionality.
Deep Dive into U-Prove Cryptographic protocolsA feast for cryptographers and mathematicians! in this video Stefan describes in details the cryptography behind U-Prove’s algorithm. Not for the faint of heart!

“I know that my good friend Felix felt strongly about U-Prove: I am so glad that we can finally share this! Congratulations to Stefan, Christian, Greg and everybody in the IDA division that made this happen

Downloads

- U-Prove CTP

- U-Prove SDK C# edition or Java edition

This blog is about technology issues, problems, plans for the future, speculative possibilities, long term ideas - all things that should make any self-respecting product marketer with concrete goals and metrics run for the hills!  But today, just for once, I’m going to pick up an actual Microsoft press release and lay it on you.  The reason?  Microsoft has just done something very special, and the fact that the announcement was a key part of the RSA Conference Keynote is itself important:

SAN FRANCISCO — March 2, 2010 — Today at RSA Conference 2010, Microsoft Corp. outlined how the company continues to make progress toward its End to End Trust vision. In his keynote address, Scott Charney, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s Trustworthy Computing Group, explained how the company’s vision for End to End Trust applies to cloud computing, detailed progress toward a claims-based identity metasystem, and called for public and private organizations alike to prevent and disrupt cybercrime.

“End to End Trust is our vision for realizing a safer, more trusted Internet,” said Charney. “To enable trust inside, and outside, of cloud computing environments will require security and privacy fundamentals, technology innovations, and social, economic, political and IT alignment.”

Further, Charney explained that identity solutions that provide more secure and private access to both on-site and cloud applications are key to enabling a safer, more trusted enterprise and Internet. As part of that effort, Microsoft today released a community technology preview of the U-Prove technology, which enables online providers to better protect privacy and enhance security through the minimal disclosure of information in online transactions. To encourage broad community evaluation and input, Microsoft announced it is providing core portions of the U-Prove intellectual property under the Open Specification Promise, as well as releasing open source software development kits in C# and Java editions. Charney encouraged the industry, developers and IT professionals to develop identity solutions that help protect individual privacy.

The company also shared details about a new partnership with the Fraunhofer Institute for Open Communication Systems in Berlin on an interoperability prototype project integrating U-Prove and the Microsoft identity platform with the German government’s future use of electronic identity cards.

As further evidence of how the company is enabling a safer, more trusted enterprise, Microsoft also today released Forefront Identity Manager 2010, a part of its Business Ready Security strategy. Forefront Identity Manager enables policy-based identity management across diverse environments, empowers business customers with self-service capabilities, and provides IT professionals with rich administrative tools.

In addition, Charney reviewed company efforts to creatively disrupt and prevent cybercrime. Citing Microsoft’s recently announced Operation b49, a Microsoft-led initiative to neutralize the well-known Waledac botnet, Charney stated that while focusing on security and privacy fundamentals and threat mitigation remains necessary, the industry needs to be more aggressive in blunting the impact of cybercriminals. Operation b49 is an example of how the private sector can get more creative in its collective approach to fighting criminals online.

“We are committed to collaborating with industry and governments worldwide to realize a safer, more trusted Internet through the creative disruption and prevention of cybercrime,” Charney said.

Readers may remember the promise I made when Microsoft’s purchase of U-Prove and Credentica was announced in March 2008 and some worried Microsoft might turn minimal disclosure into something proprietary:

[It isn't...] trivial to figure out the best legal mecahnisms for making the intellectual property and even the code available to the ecosystem.  Lawyers are needed, and it takes a while.  But I can guarantee everyone that I have zero intention of hoarding Minimal Disclosure Tokens or turning U-Prove into a proprietary Microsoft technology silo.

So here are the specifics of today’s annoucement:

• Microsoft is opening up the entire foundation of the U-Prove intellectual property by way of a cryptographic specification published under the Microsoft Open Specification Promise (OSP).  
• Microsoft is donating two reference SDKs in source code (a C# and a Java version) under a liberal free software license (BSD); the objective here is to enable the broadest audience of commercial and open source software developers to implement the technology in any way they see fit.
• Microsoft is releasing a public Community Technology Preview (CTP) of the integration of the U-Prove technology (as per the crypto spec) with Microsoft’s identity platform technologies (Active Directory Federation Services 2.0, Windows Identity Foundation, and Windows CardSpace v2).
• As part of the CTP, Microsoft is releasing a second specification (also under the OSP) that specifies the integration of the U-Prove technology into so-called “identity selectors” using WS-Trust and information cards.

I really want to thank Stefan Brands, Christian Paquin, and Greg Thompson for what they’ve done for the Internet in bringing this work to its present state.  Open source availability is tremendously important.  So is the achievement of integrating U-Prove with Microsoft’s metasystem components so as to show that this is real, usable technology - not some far-off dream.

At RSA, Scott Charney showed a 4-minute video made with the Fraunhofer FOKUS Institute in Germany that demonstrates interoperability with the German eID card system (scheduled to begin rolling out in November 2010). The video demonstrates how the integration of the U-Prove technology can offer citizens (students, in this case) the ability to minimally disclose authoritative personal information.

There is also a 20-minute video that explains the benefits of integrating the U-Prove technology into online identity management frameworks.

The U-Prove code, whitepaper and specifications, along with the modules that extend ADFS V2, WIF and CardSpace to support the technology, are available here.

Gunnar Peterson has written many good things about architecture and identity over the last few years. Now he lays down the guantlet and challenges cloud advocates with a great video that throws all the fundamental issues into sardonic relief. Everyone involved with the cloud should watch this video repeatedly and come back with really good answers to all that is implied and questioned… albeit through humor.

There’s a new comic strip about software with the, um, mysterious title, Not Invented Here (I just caught the preposterous domain name:  http://notinventedhe.re)…   The strip deals with issues like security, and comments posted by readers say things like, “I DEMAND you take the bug out of my company’s conference room immediately!” and “Wow, it is as if you have a mole in our office!”.   So, with the authors’ permission, here’s a taste.

It all starts off innocently enough:

Wait.  I think I’ve met these people.

Yikes.  Maybe I am these people!

And if you’re in the business, you can’t miss this one, which will take you over to the NIH site.

If you’re wondering where this can possibly come from, the strip is by Bill Barnes and Paul Southworth.  I don’t know Paul yet, but readers may know Bill’s work from Unshelved, which has been making librarians guffaw for years (an  easy task?)  The truth is, Bill knows a lot about what goes on with software - in fact one of his gigs was herding cats during the first version of CardSpace.  Now he’s totally dedicated to his strips - should be a lot of fun - and enlightening too. 

My friend Cameron Westland, who has worked on some cool applications for the iPhone, wrote me to complain that I linked to iPhone Privacy:

I understand the implications of what you are trying to say, but how is this any different from Mac OS X applications accessing the address book or Windows applications accessing contacts? (I’m not sure about Windows, but I know it’s possible on a Mac).

Also, the article touches on storing patient information on an iPhone. I believe Seriot is guilty of a major oversight in simply correlating the fact that spy phone has access to contacts with it also being able to do so in a secured enterprise.

If the iPhone is deployed in the enterprise, the corporate administrators can control exactly which applications get installed. In the situations where patient information is stored on the phone, they should be using their own security review process to verify that all applications installed meet the HIPPA  certification requirements. Apple makes no claim that applications meet the stringent needs of certain industries - that’s why they give control to administrators to encrypt phones, restrict specific application installs, and do remote wipes.

Also, Seriot did no research behavior of a phone connected to a company’s active directory, versus just plain old address book… This is cargo cult science at best, and I’m really surprised you linked to it!

I buy Cameron’s point that the controls available to enterprises mitigate a number of the attacks presented by Seriot - and agree this is  important.  How do these controls work?  Corporate administrators can set policies specifying the digital signatures of applications that can be installed.  They can use their own processes to decide what applications these will be. 

None of this depends on App Store verification, sandboxing, or Apple’s control of platform content.  In fact it is no different from the universally available ability to use a combination of enterprise policy and digital signature to protect enterprise desktop and server systems.  Other features, like the ability for an operator to wipe information, are also pretty much universal.

If the iPhone can be locked down in enterprises, why is Seriot’s paper still worth reading?  Because many companies and even governments are interested in developing customer applications that run on phones.  They can’t dictate to customers what applications to install, and so lock-down solutions are of little interest.  They turn to Apple’s own claims about security, and find statements like this one, taken from the otherwise quite interesting iPhone security overview.

Runtime Protection

Applications on the device are “sandboxed” so they cannot access data stored by other applications. In addition, system files, resources, and the kernel are shielded from the user’s application space. If an application needs to access data from another application, it can only do so using the APIs and services provided by iPhone OS. Code generation is also prevented.

Seriot shows that taking this claim at face value would be risky.  As he says in an eWeek interview:

“In late 2009, I was involved in discussions with the Swiss private banking industry regarding the confidentiality of iPhone personal data,” Seriot told eWEEK. “Bankers wanted to know how safe their information [stores] were, which ones are exactly at risk and which ones are not. In brief, I showed that an application downloaded from the App Store to a standard iPhone could technically harvest a significant quantity of personal data … [including] the full name, the e-mail addresses, the phone number, the keyboard cache entries, the Wi-Fi connection logs and the most recent GPS location.” 

It is worth noting that Seriot’s demonstration is very easy to replicate, and doesn’t depend on silly assumptions like convincing the user to disable their security settings and ignore all warnings.

The points made about banking applications apply even more to medical applications.  Doctors are effectively customers from the point of view of the information management services they use.  Those services won’t be able to dictate the applications their customers deploy.  I know for sure that my doctor, bless his soul,  doesn’t have an IT department that sets policies limiting his ability to play games or buy stocks.  If he starts using his phone for patient-related activities, he should be aware of the potential issues, and that’s what MedPage was talking about.

Neither MedPage, nor CNET, nor eWeek nor Seriot nor I are trying to trash the iPhone - it’s just that application isolation is one of the hardest problems of computer science.  We are pointing out that the iPhone is a computing device like all the others and subject to the same laws of digital physics, despite dangerous mythology to the contrary.  On this point I don’t think Cameron Westland and I disagree.

The MedPage Today blog recently wrote about “iPhone Security Risks and How to Protect Your Data — A Must-Read for Medical Professionals.”  The story begins: 

Many healthcare providers feel comfortable with the iPhone because of its fluid operating system, and the extra functionality it offers, in the form of games and a variety of other apps.  This added functionality is missing with more enterprise-based smart phones, such as the Blackberry platform.  However, this added functionality comes with a price, and exposes the iPhone to security risks. 

Nicolas Seriot, a researcher from the Swiss University of Applied Sciences, has found some alarming design flaws in the iPhone operating system that allow rogue apps to access sensitive information on your phone.

MedPage quotes a CNET article where Elinor Mills reports:

Lax security screening at Apple’s App Store and a design flaw are putting iPhone users at risk of downloading malicious applications that could steal data and spy on them, a Swiss researcher warns.

Apple’s iPhone app review process is inadequate to stop malicious apps from getting distributed to millions of users, according to Nicolas Seriot, a software engineer and scientific collaborator at the Swiss University of Applied Sciences (HEIG-VD). Once they are downloaded, iPhone apps have unfettered access to a wide range of privacy-invasive information about the user’s device, location, activities, interests, and friends, he said in an interview Tuesday…

In addition, a sandboxing technique limits access to other applications’ data but leaves exposed data in the iPhone file system, including some personal information, he said.

To make his point, Seriot has created open-source proof-of-concept spyware dubbed “SpyPhone” that can access the 20 most recent Safari searches, YouTube history, and e-mail account parameters like username, e-mail address, host, and login, as well as detailed information on the phone itself that can be used to track users, even when they change devices.

Following the link to Seriot’s paper, called iPhone Privacy, here is the abstract:

It is a little known fact that, despite Apple’s claims, any applications downloaded from the App Store to a standard iPhone can access a significant quantity of personal data.

This paper explains what data are at risk and how to get them programmatically without the user’s knowledge. These data include the phone number, email accounts settings (except passwords), keyboard cache entries, Safari searches and the most recent GPS location.

This paper shows how malicious applications could pass the mandatory App Store review unnoticed and harvest data through officially sanctioned Apple APIs. Some attack scenarios and recommendations are also presented.

In light of Seriot’s paper, MedPage concludes:

These security risks are substantial for everyday users, but become heightened if your phone contains sensitive data, in the form of patient information, and when your phone is used for patient care.   Over at iMedicalApps.com, we are not fans of medical apps that enable you to input patient data, and there are several out there.  But we also have peers who have patient contact information stored on their phones, patient information in their calendars, or are accessible to their patients via e-mail.  You can even e-prescribe using your iPhone. 

I don’t want to even think about e-prescribing using an iPhone right now, thank you.

Anyone who knows anything about security has known all along that the iPhone - like all devices - is vulnerable to some set of attacks.  For them, iPhone Privacy will be surprising not because it reveals possible attacks, but because of how amazingly elementary they are (the paper is a must-read from this point of view).  

On a positive note, the paper might awaken some of those sent into a deep sleep by proselytizers convinced that Apple’s App Store censorship program is reasonable because it protects them from rogue applications.

Evidently Apple’s App Store staff take their mandate to protect us from people like award winning Mad Magazine cartoonist  Tom Richmond pretty seriously (see Apple bans Nancy Pelosi bobble head).  If their approach to “protecting” the underlying platform has any merit at all, perhaps a few of them could be reassigned to work part time on preventing trivial and obvious hacker exploits..

But I don’t personally think a closed platform with a censorship board is either the right approach or one that can possibly work as attackers get more serious (in fact computer science has long known that this approach is baloney).  The real answer will lie in hard, unfashionable and (dare I say it?) expensive R&D into application isolation and related technologies. I hope this will be an outcome:  first, for the sake of building a secure infrastructure;  second, because one of my phones is an iPhone and I like to explore downloaded applications too.

[Heads Up: Khaja Ahmed]

As I discussed here, the EFF is running an experimental site demonstrating that browsers ooze an unnecessary ”browser fingerprint” allowing users to be identified across sites without their knowledge.  One can easily imagine this scenario:

1. Site “A” offers some service you are interested in and you release your name and address to it.  At the same time, the site captures your browser fingerprint.
2. Site “B” establishes a relationship with site “A” whereby when it sends “A” a browser fingerprint and “A” responds with the matching identifying information.
3. You are therefore unknowingly identified at site “B”.

I can see browser fingerprints being used for a number of purposes.  Some sites might use a fingerprint to keep track of you even after you have cleared your cookies - and rationalize this as providing added security.  Others will inevitably employ it for commercial purposes - targeted identifying customer information is high value.  And the technology can even be used for corporate espionage and cyber investigations.

It is important to point out that like any fingerprint, the identification is only probabilistic.  EFF is studying what these probabilities are.  In my original test, my browser was unique in 120,000 other browsers - a number I found very disturbing.

But friends soon wrote back to report that their browser was even “more unique” than mine!  And going through my feeds today I saw a post at Tomek’s DS World where he reported a staggering fingerprint uniqueness of 1 in 433,751:

It’s not that I really think of myself as super competitive, but these results were so extreme I decided to take the test again.  My new score is off the scale:

Tomek ends his post this way:

“So a browser can be used to identify a user in the Internet or to harvest some information without his consent. Will it really become a problem and will it be addressed in some way in browsers in the future? This question has to be answered by people responsible for browser development.”

I have to disagree.  It is already a problem.  A big problem.  These outcomes weren’t at all obvious in the early days of the browser.  But today the writing is on the wall and needs to be addressed.  It’s a matter right at the core of delivering on a trustworthy computing infrastructure.    We need to evolve the world’s browsers to employ minimal disclosure, releasing only what is necessary, and never providing a fingerprint without the user’s consent.

Joerg Resch at Kuppinger Cole points us to new research showing  how social networks can be used in conjunction with browser leakage to provide accurate identification of users who think they are browsing anonymously.

Joerg writes:

Thorsten Holz, Gilbert Wondracek, Engin Kirda and Christopher Kruegel from Isec Laboratory for IT Security found a simple and very effective way to identify a person behind a website visitor without asking for any kind of authentication. Identify in this case means: full name, adress, phone numbers and so on. What they do, is just exploiting the browser history to find out, which social networks the user is a member of and to which groups he or she has subscribed within that social network.

The Practical Attack to De-Anonymize Social Network Users begins with what is known as “history stealing”.  

Browsers don’t allow web sites to access the user’s “history” of visited sites.  But we all know that browsers render sites we have visited in a different color than sites we have not.  This is available programmatically through javascript by examining the a:visited style.  So malicious sites can play a list of URLs and examine the a:visited style to determine if they have been visited, and can do this without the user being aware of it.

This attack has been known for some time, but what is novel is its use.  The authors claim the groups in all major social networks are represented through URLs, so history stealing can be translated into “group membership stealing”.  This brings us to the core of this new work.  The authors have developed a model for the identification characteristics of group memberships – a model that will outlast this particular attack, as dramatic as it is.

The researchers have created a demonstration site that works with the European social network Xing.  Joerg tried it out and, as you can see from the table at left, it identified him uniquely – although he had done nothing to authenticate himself.  He says,

“Here is a screenshot from the self-test I did with the de-anonymizer described in my last post. I´m a member in 5 groups at Xing, but only active in just 2 of them. This is already enough to successfully de-anonymize me, at least if I use the Google Chrome Browser. Using Microsoft Internet Explorer did not lead to a result, as the default security settings (I use them in both browsers) seem to be stronger. That´s weird!”

Since I’m not a user of Xing I can’t explore this first hand.

Joerg goes on to ask if history-stealing is a crime?  If it’s not, how mainstream is this kind of analysis going to become?  What is the right legal framework for considering these issues?  One thing for sure:  this kind of demonstration, as it becomes widely understood, risks profoundly changing the way people look at the Internet.

To return to the idea of minimal disclosure for the browser, why do sites we visit need to be able to read the a:visited attribute?  This should again be thought of as “fingerprinting”, and before a site is able to retrieve the fingerprint, the user must be made aware that it opens the possibility of being uniquely identified without authentication.

Not five minutes after pressing enter on my previous post a friend wrote back and challenged me to compare IE’s behavior with that of Firefox.  I don’t like doing product comparisons but clearly this is a question others will ask so I’ll share the results with you:

Results:  behavior of the two browsers are essentially identical.  In both cases, my browser was uniquely identified.

Conclusion:  we need to work across the industry to align browsers with minimal disclosure principles.  How much information needs to be released to a site we don’t trust yet?  To what extent can the detailed information currently release be collapsed into non-identifying categories?  When there is some compelling reason to release detailed information, how do we inform the user that the site wants to obtain a fingerprint?

Slashdot’s CmdrTaco points us to a research project announced by EFF’s Peter Eckersley that I expect will provoke both discussion and action:

What fingerprints does your browser leave behind as you surf the web?

Traditionally, people assume they can prevent a website from identifying them by disabling cookies on their web browser. Unfortunately, this is not the whole story.

When you visit a website, you are allowing that site to access a lot of information about your computer’s configuration. Combined, this information can create a kind of fingerprint - a signature that could be used to identify you and your computer. But how effective would this kind of online tracking be?

EFF is running an experiment to find out. Our new website Panopticlick will anonymously log the configuration and version information from your operating system, your browser, and your plug-ins, and compare it to our database of five million other configurations. Then, it will give you a uniqueness score - letting you see how easily identifiable you might be as you surf the web.

Adding your information to our database will help EFF evaluate the capabilities of Internet tracking and advertising companies, who are already using techniques of this sort to record people’s online activities. They develop these methods in secret, and don’t always tell the world what they’ve found. But this experiment will give us more insight into the privacy risk posed by browser fingerprinting, and help web users to protect themselves.

To join the experiment:
http://panopticlick.eff.org/

To learn more about the theory behind it:
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/01/primer-information-theory-and-priva…

Interesting that my own browser was especially recognizable:

I know my video configuration is pretty bizarre - but don’t understand why I should be broadcasting that when I casually surf the web.  I would also like to understand what is so special about my user agent info. 

Pixel resolution like 1435 x 810 x 32 seems unnecessarily specific.  Applying the concept of minimal disclosure, it would be better to reveal simply that my machine is in some useful ”class” of resolution that would not overidentify me.

I would think the provisioning of highly identifying information should be limited to sites with which I have an identity relationship.  If we can agree on a shared mechanism for storing information about our trust for various sites (information cards offer this capability) our browsers could automatically adjust to the relationship they were in, releasing information as necessary.  This is a good example of how a better identity system is needed to protect privacy while providing increased functionality.

Now that the world is so thoroughly post-modern, how often do you come across information that qualifies as unexpected?  Well, I have to say that the following story , appearing in the The Australian, left me wide-eyed:

Yesterday, in the church of the City of London Corporation, (Canon Parrot)  presented an updated version of Plow Monday, an observance that dates from medieval times. On this day, the first Monday after Twelfth Night, farm labourers would bring a plough to the door of the church to be blessed.

“When I arrived a few months ago I looked at this service and thought, ‘Why do we have a Plow Monday?’,” Canon Parrott said. Men and women coming to his church no longer used ploughs; their tools were their laptops, their iPhones and their BlackBerries.

So he wrote a blessing and strode out to deliver it before a congregation of 80, the white heat of technology shining from his every pronouncement. “I invite you to have your mobile phone out … though I would like you to put it on silent,” he said.

This was Church 2.0. Behind him, the altar resembled a counter at PC World. Upon it, laid out like holy relics, were four smart phones, one Apple laptop and one Dell.

Then, after another hymn, came the blessing of the smart phones. The Lord Mayor of London offered his BlackBerry to Canon Parrott, which was received with due reverence and placed upon the altar.

The congregation held their phones in the air, and Canon Parrott addressed the Almighty. “By Your blessing, may these phones and computers, symbols of all the technology and communication in our daily lives, be a reminder to us that You are a God who communicates with us and who speaks by Your Word. Amen.”

It makes me wonder what Innis said to McLuhan when he read abut this.

Le Figaro carried a report of an additional prayer, “”May our tongues be gentle, our e-mails be simple and our websites be accessible”. 

Perhaps it is asking too much, but I would have really liked Father Parrott to add, “websites be accessible and secure.”  After all - it can’t hurt.   Perhaps next time?

Steve Riley at Amazon takes a fascinating and non-ideological approach on his new blog.  The combination will keep me tuned in - I expect others will feel the same way.  He writes:

“As I’ve talked with customers who have deployed or plan to deploy Windows Server 2008 instances on Amazon EC2, one feature they commonly inquire about is Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS). There seems to be a lot of interest in ADFS v2 with its support for WS-Federation and Windows Identity Foundation. These capabilities are fully supported in our Windows Server 2008 AMIs and will work with applications developed for both the “public” side of AWS and those you might run on instances inside Amazon VPC.

“I’d like to get a better sense of how you might use ADFS. When you state that you need “federation,” what are you wanting to do? I imagine most scenarios involve applications on Amazon EC2 instances obtaining tokens from an ADFS server located inside your corporate network. This makes sense when your users are in your own domains and the applications running on Amazon EC2 are yours.

“Another scenario involves a forest living entirely inside Amazon EC2. Imagine you’ve created the next killer SaaS app. As customers sign up, you’d like to let them use their own corpnet credentials rather than bother with creating dedicated logons (your customers will love you for this). You’d create an application domain in which you’d deploy your application, configured to trust tokens only from the application’s ADFS. Your customers would configure their ADFS servers to issue tokens not for your application but for your application domain ADFS, which in turn issues tokens to your application. Signing up new customers is now much easier.

“What else do you have in mind for federation? How will you use it? Feel free to join the discussion. I’ve started a thread on the forums, please add your thoughts there. I’m looking forward to some great ideas.”

I really look forward to this.  Let’s see where it goes…  

Given the mail I get from mutual customers, I know Steve will end up with some interesting insights.

Internet security is a sitting duck that could easily succumb to a number of bleak possible futures.

One prediction we can make with certainty is that as the overall safety of the net continues to erode, individual web sites will flail around looking for ways to protect themselves. They will come across novel ideas that seem to make sense from the vantage point of a single web site. Yet if they implement these ideas, most of them will backfire. Internet users have to navigate many different sites on an irregular basis. For them, the experience of disparate mechanisms and paradigms on every different site will be even more confusing and troubling than the current degenerating landscape. The Seventh Law of Identity is animated by these very concerns.

I know from earlier exchanges that Michael Ramirez understands these issues – as well as their architectural implications. So I can just imagine how he felt when he first encountered a new system that seems to represent an unfortunately great example of this dynamic. His first post on the matter started this way:

“Logging into the DFAS myPay site is frustrating. This is the gateway where DoD employees can view and change their financial data and records.

“In an attempt secure the interface (namely to prevent key loggers), they have implemented a javascript-based keyboard where the user must enter their PIN using their mouse (or using the keyboard pressing tab LOTS of times).

“A randomization function is used to change the position of the buttons, presumably to prevent a simple click-tracking virus from simply replaying the click sequence. Numbers always appear on the upper row and the letters will appear in a random position on the same row where they exist on the keyboard (e.g. QWERTY letters will always appear on the top row, just in a random order).

“At first glance, I assumed that there would be some server-side state that identified the position of the buttons (as to not allow the user’s browser to arbitrarily choose the positions). Looking at how the button layout is generated, however, makes it clear that the position is indeed generated by the client-side alone. Javascript functions are called to randomize the locations, and the locations of these buttons are included as part of the POST parameters upon authentication.

“A visOrder variable is included with a simple substitution cipher to identify button locations: 0 is represented by position 0, 1 by position 1, etc. Thus:

“Thus any virus/program can easily mount an online guessing attack (since it defines the substitution pattern), and can quickly decipher the PIN if it has access to the POST parameters.

“The web site’s security implementation is painfully trivial, so we can conclude that the Javascript keyboard is only to prevent keyloggers. But it has a number of side effects, especially with respect to the security of the password. Given the tedious nature of PIN entry, users choose extremely simplistic passwords. MyPay actually encourages this as it does not enforce complexity requirements and limits the length of the password between 4 and 8 characters. There is no support for upper/lower case or special characters. 36 possible values over an 4-character search space is not terribly secure.”

A few days later, Michael was back with an even stranger report. In fact this particular ”user journey” verges on the bizarre. Michael writes:

“MyPay recently overhauled their interface and made it more “secure.” I have my doubts, but they certainly have changed how they interact with the user.

“I was a bit speechless. Pleading with users is new, but maybe it’ll work for them. Apparently it’ll be the only thing working for them:

Although most users have established their new login credentials with no trouble, some users are calling the Central Customer Support Unit for assistance. As a result, customer support is experiencing high call volume, and many customers are waiting on hold longer than usual.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. We are doing everything possible to remedy this situation.

Michael concludes by making it clear he thinks “more than a few” users may have had trouble. He says, “Maybe, just maybe, it’s because of your continued use of the ridiculous virtual keyboard. Yes, you’ve increased the password complexity requirements (which actually increased security), but slaughtered what little usability you had. I promise you that getting rid of it will ‘remedy this situation.’”

One might just shrug one’s shoulders and wait for this to pass. But I can’t do that.  I feel compelled to redouble our efforts to produce and adopt a common standards-based approach to authentication that will work securely and in a consistent way across different web sites and environments.  In other words, reusable identities, the claims-based architecture, and truly usable and intuitive visual interfaces.

Earlier this week I presented the Identity Keynote at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference (PDC) in LA.  The slide deck is here, and the video is here.

After announcing the release of the Windows Identity Foundation (WIF) as an Extension to .NET, I brought forward three architect/engineers to discuss how claims had helped them solve their development problems.   I chose these particular guests because I wanted the developer audience to be able to benefit from the insights they had previously shared with me about the advantages - and challenges - of adopting the claims based model.  Each guest talks about the approach he took and the lessons learned.

Andrew Bybee, Principal Program Manager from Microsoft Dynamics CRM, talked about the role of identity in delivering the “the Power of Choice” - the ability for his customers to run his software wherever they want, on premises or in the cloud or in combination, and to offer access to anyone they choose.

Venky Veeraraghavan, the Program Manager in charge of identity for SharePoint, talks about what it was like to completely rethink the way identity works in Sharepoint so it takes advantage of the claims based architecture to solve problems that previously had been impossibly difficult.  He explores the problems of ”Multi-hop” systems and web farms, especially the “Dreaded Second Hop” - which he admits “really, really scares us…”  I find his explanation riveting and think any developer of large scale systems will agree.

Dmitry Sotnikov, who is Manager of New Product Research at Quest Software, presents a remarkable Azure-based version of a product Quest has previously offered only “on premise”.  The service is a backup system for Active Directory, and involved solving a whole set of hard identity problems involving devices and data as well as people.

Later in the presentation, while discussing future directions, I announce the Community Technical Preview of our new work on REST-based authorization (a profile of OAuth), and then show the prototype of the mutli-protocol identity selector Mike Jones unveiled at the recent IIW.   And finally, I talk for the first time about “System.Identity”, work on user-centric next generation directory that I wanted to take to the community for feedback.  I’ll be blogging about this a lot and hopefully others from the blogosphere will find time to discuss it with me.

Attached Media: video/x-ms-wmv (108 198 ko)

I’ve sometimes been of two minds about OpenID.  I’ve always seen it as alluring because of its simplicity and openness.  It seemed perfect for simple web applications.

But in my darker moments, I worried about some of the system’s usability and security issues.  In particular, I was concerned about how easy it would be for an “evil site” to trick users into going to a web site that looks identical to their OpenID provider, convincing them to log in, and then stealing their credentials.  If this were to happen, everything that is good about OpenID would turn into something negative.

OpenID has become a key part of the Identity Metasystem

I think many of us involved with the OpenID community came to the same conclusions, but felt that if we kept trying to move adoption forward, we’d be able to figure out how to solve the problems.  In the last year, OpenID has without doubt become the most widely adopted system for reusable internet identity.  Adoption by destination sites continues to grow dramatically: approximately 50,000 sites as of July 1, 2009.  The big Internet properties like Google, Yahoo, AOL, MySpace, and Windows Live have become (or are becoming) OpenID Providers.   As a result, the vast majority of the online US population has an account that can be used to log in at the growing number of destination sites. 

Maybe even more important, some of these sites are of the kind that can quickly change perception and behavior. 

Most notable is Facebook, which took a huge step forward when it started accepting OpenIDs for login - blowing away the old saw that “no one wants to be a relying party”. 

Now, the US Government has decided to adopt OpenID as one of the identity protocols for citizen interaction - again, as Relying Party, not Identity Provider.

Sea Change

There is a sea-change here.  I strongly believe the right thing to do is get  behind OpenID as part of the Identity Metasystem, help promote adoption, and work with the community to make it safer and easier to use.  What is encouraging is that the community has repeatedly shown its ability to evolve as it deploys, and has been able to rapidly extend the standard from the inside.   It has now become widely recognized in the industry that active client software (also called an “Identity Selector”) for OpenID could solve most of its problems, given some minor revisions or additions to the protocol.  By remembering the identities you use, this kind of software can address two sets of issues:

• Usability:  Lets you bring your identities with you to the site, rather than the site having to guess what identities you have
• Security:  Protects you from being sent to a malicious site impersonating a real site that would steal your password

New prototype at IIW

Yesterday at the OpenID Summit hosted by Yahoo, Microsoft’s Mike Jones and Ariel Gordon  showed some of the work their team has been doing to help figure out how this kind of capability could work.  What’s cool is that the client they were showing is completely optional - without it, OpenID continues to work as it currently does.  But with it, experience improves and the dangers are greatly reduced.  I agree with them that demand for a better and safer OpenID user experience will drive selector adoption, which will in turn enable scenarios at higher levels of assurance than are possible with OpenID today.

Ariel Gordon, the main UX designer, told me, “I see it as a starting point for joint work with others in the community - definitely not a finished solution or product.”

It is consistent with the Information Card metaphor:

• Your OpenIDs are shown as visual cards
• You select an OpenID by clicking
• The OpenID last used at the site is the default selection

New OpenIDs can be added on the fly, by picking one from a list suggested by the site, or by typing the provider’s URL.

Mike made a good point about what this means for people who use smaller OpenID providers:  “The cool thing is that it remembers the OpenIDs you’ve used and where you used them […] With a web-based Nascar user interface, Arizona Sate University users will never get the same user experience that Google.com users get […]”

Good Tweets

Unfortunately I couldn’t attend the meeting in person but remained wired to the tweets.  Summit host Allen Tom from Yahoo said, “Showing already used OpeniIDs is a great protection against phishing: if a rogue RP tries to send the user to ‘fake yahoo.com’, a regular Yahoo user will click on his Yahoo button in the selector and won’t even see the fake yahoo link.”

He added, “The prototype selector goes in the right direction by offering a better experience when present, while not preventing users to access their favorite sites from any computer.”

Google’s Eric Sachs saw value too. “…And a fake yahoo tile would say “never used here” so that’s even more information to help protect the user.”

Bringing our perceptions together from different organizations with different missions and  vantage points is what can make all of this succeed. The partnering is the key.

So one of the best things about the prototype, in my view, is that it has already demonstrated collaboration between a whole set of really experienced community members:

• Relying Parties: JanRain, Plaxo, Deutsche Telekom
• OpenID Providers: Yahoo, Google, JanRain
• Identity Selectors: Microsoft, Deutsche Telekom
• Enhancing Specifications: Microsoft, Facebook, Yahoo. 

Today, the same prototype was presented to the influential Internet Identity Workshop .  I’ll add to my growing lis of IOU’s a promise to do a screen capture of how the prototype works so everyone can take a look.

John Fontana writes about the SAML interoperability test in ComputerWorld, turning quite a bit of his attention to Microsoft:

“Microsoft completed its first SAML interoperability test and the results are in: Active Directory Federation Services 2.0 software received a passing grade.

“Microsoft’s federated identity platform passed its first SAML 2.0 interoperability test with favorable marks, signaling the end to the vendor’s standoff against the protocol.

“The eight-week, multivendor interoperability workout conducted by the Liberty Alliance and the Kantara Initiative also resulted in passing marks for two other first-time entrants – SAP and Siemens. Return testers Entrust, IBM, Novell and Ping Identity also passed. Results were announced Wednesday.

“The Liberty Interoperable testing was a great opportunity to verify that Active Directory Federation Services (AD FS) 2.0 is interoperable with others’ SAML 2.0 implementations. This should give our customers confidence that their federation deployments using ADFS will ‘just work,’” says Conrad Bayer, product unit manager for federated identity at Microsoft.

“In the past, Microsoft has been dismissive of the Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML), a standard protocol for exchanging authentication and authorization data between and among security checkpoints, preferring the WS-Federation and other protocols it helped develop. The company previously supported the SAML token, but never the transport profiles of the protocol…

As much as I love John, I don’t think ”dismissive” really describes our attitude - at least I hope it doesn’t.  It is true that our initial thinking was that the world would be a ”tidier place” if people used one single protocol that worked both for “Active Clients” (e.g. applications that run on your PC or phone) and “Passive Clients” (web pages served up in a browser).  We saw WS-Federation as a way to achieve that technical symmetry.  But I and others have also said for several years that we saw much of what people were doing with SAML as being innovative and positive.  And we have made it very clear that an Identity Metasystem means “no silos”.  

Today you can see the results of this thinking in our new product.  ADFS V2 does everything it can to conform with the Identity Metasystem idea.  That means supporting SAML as well as the other Federation and Claims Transformation protocols (e.g. WS-Trust and WS-Federation). I think the synergy will be great for our customers and the industry.

John goes on to say: 

“Full matrix” testing means all participants must test against each other. The test was conducted over the Internet from points around the globe using real-world scenarios between service providers and identity providers as defined by the SAML 2.0 specification.

Microsoft participated in the testing with Active Directory Federation Services 2.0 (formerly code-named Geneva), which is slated to ship later this year. ADFS 2.0 is part of a larger identity platform that includes Windows Identity Foundation and Windows Cardspace.

Microsoft said earlier this year it would have SAML 2.0 certification before it released Geneva. The SAML profiles ADFS 2.0 supports cover the core features of federation.

ADFS 2.0 provides identity information and serves as a Security Token Service (STS), a transformation engine that is key to Microsoft’s identity architecture. ADFS lets companies extend Active Directory to create single sign-on between local network resources and cloud services.

[Read more here]

The success of the Identity Metasystem depends heavily on having products available from multiple vendors that are proven to interoperate and ready to deploy.  Kantara Initiative and Liberty Alliance have contributed significantly to this by helping test products against specific profiles.  Kudos to everyone involved with the definition, organization and testing of the eGovernment SAML 2.0 profile v1.5.  This represents a real step forward given the diversity of products involved.

SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 30  – Kantara Initiative and Liberty Alliance today announced that identity products from Entrust, IBM, Microsoft, Novell, Ping Identity, SAP and Siemens have passed Liberty Interoperable(TM) SAML 2.0 interoperability testing. These vendors participated in the third Liberty Interoperable full-matrix testing event to be administered by the Drummond Group Inc., and the first event to test products against the new eGovernment SAML 2.0 profile v1.5 recently released by Liberty Alliance. Web-based full-matrix testing allows vendors to participate from anywhere in the world and features rigorous processes for ensuring products meet SAML 2.0 interoperability requirements for open, secure and privacy-respecting federated identity management.

“The summer 2009 full-matrix testing event included more vendors than ever before, reflecting the worldwide demand among enterprises and governments for SAML 2.0 identity-enabled solutions that have proven to interoperate,” said Roger Sullivan, president of the Kantara Initiative Board of Trustees, president of Liberty Alliance and vice president, Oracle Identity Management. “Organizations can count on Liberty Interoperable for products that have proven to meet interoperability requirements today and over the long-term as the program moves to expand within Kantara Initiative to test against additional identity standards and protocols.”

This year’s program featured enhanced SAML 2.0 testing scenarios between Service Provider (SP) and Identity Provider (IdP). The eGovernment SAML 2.0 profile and its requisite test plan have been developed by Liberty Alliance with input from the Danish, New Zealand and US governments. Testing processes for the eGovernment profile included multiple SP logout scenarios, requested authentication context comparisons, and other aspects of SAML 2.0 necessary to meet interoperability, privacy, security and transparency requirements in the global eGovernment sector. A review of the SAML 2.0 v1.5 eGovernment profile is available here.

“SAML 2.0 is the most popular federation protocol in the industry and utilized by commercial, educational, and government institutions around the globe,” said Gerry Gebel, VP and service director at Burton Group. “Federated single sign-on demand is growing, spurred by broad adoption of SaaS applications and the general increase in collaboration among business partners in every industry. The Liberty Interoperable program is instrumental to sustaining successful deployments in advanced federation scenarios where multiple products are in use.”

During the July 14 - September 4, 2009 testing event, the following products demonstrated interoperability based on a variety of SAML 2.0 conformance modes. A detailed list outlining what each vendor passed is available at http://tinyurl.com/yahs2u8

Entrust – Entrust IdentityGuard Federation Module 9.2 is a part of Entrust’s versatile authentication platform, supporting numerous authentication methods in one cost-effective solution. Organizations are empowered to choose the right authentication method(s) for their users accessing enterprise, consumer, government or mobile applications. Entrust IdentityGuard includes support for username & password, IP-geolocation, device-ID, questions and answers, out-of-band OTP soft tokens (via voice, SMS, e-mail), grid and eGrid cards, digital certificates and a range of hardware OTP tokens. Entrust IdentityGuard enables rapid deployment, centralized policy management, and an easy integration into the enterprise. Entrust IdentityGuard also includes the ability to apply transaction digital signatures for increased confidence in online transactions. Entrust IdentityGuard serves as a certified SAML 2.0 identity provider, providing standards-based interoperability to organizations. Combined with Entrust’s zero-touch fraud detection solution, Entrust IdentityGuard provides a powerful risk-based solution for authenticating users.

Entrust – Entrust GetAccess 8.0 delivers a single entry and access point for user authentication and authorization across multiple Web portal applications. The solution delivers full service provider (SP) capabilities and provides organizations with security, flexibility and performance to personalize the user experience of a Web portal through the following key services: flexible authentication, including seamless integration with Entrust IdentityGuard for step-up authentication; proven authentication interoperability via standards such as SAML, Kerberos, X.509 and others; SSO to Web and non-Web applications via SAML; authorization including fine-grained access control to online resources; rich policy management capabilities, allowing controlled access based on environmental considerations (e.g. authentication method used, physical location, TOD, external data sources); centralized session management; personalization of content; integration with leading application and portal vendors; web-based tools for business administration and operational control.

IBM – IBM Tivoli® Federated Identity Manager (TFIM) 6.2 provides a full featured web access management solution for managing identity and access to resources that span companies or security domains. Rather than replicate identity and security administration across companies, Tivoli Federated Identity Manager provides a simple, loosely coupled model for managing trusted identities and providing them with access to information and services including SaaS and cloud-based deployments. For companies deploying Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Web Services, TFIM provides a centralized identity mediation services for federated Web services identity management across multiple domains (e.g. Java, .NET and mainframe). TFIM supports the following standards: SAML Protocol 1.0/1.1/2.0, OpenID Authentication 1.1/2.0 - OpenID Simple Registration Extension 1.0, Information Card Profile, WS-Federation Passive Requestor Profile, Liberty ID-FF 1.1/1.2, WS-Trust 1.2/1.3.

Microsoft – Microsoft Active Directory Federation Services (AD FS) 2.0 enables Active Directory to be an identity provider in the claims based access platform. AD FS provides end users with a single sign-on experience across applications, platforms and organizations and simplifies identity management for IT Pros. AD FS 2.0 is part of the Windows Server platform, and supports both on-premises and cloud solutions.

Novell – Novell Access Manager 3.1 simplifies and safeguards online asset-sharing, helping customers control access to Web-based and traditional business applications. Trusted users gain secure authentication and access to portals, Web-based content and enterprise applications, while IT administrators gain centralized policy-based management of authentication and access privileges. What’s more, Novell Access Manager supports a broad range of platforms and directory services, and it’s flexible enough to work in even the most complex multi-vendor computing environments. Novell Access Manager makes administration easy. You can use it to centralize access control for all digital resources, and it eliminates the need for multiple software tools at various locations. One access solution fits all applications and information assets. In addition, Novell Access Manager includes support for major federation standards including Security Assertions Markup Language (SAML), WS-Federation and Liberty Alliance.

Ping Identity – PingFederate v6.1 is an Internet Identity Security platform that delivers an enterprise-class, scalable, cost effective and standards-based software solution for enabling Internet Single Sign-On, Identity-Enabled Web Services and Internet User Account Management. PingFederate provides a centralized platform for managing all of your external identity connections with customers, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) providers, partners, affiliates and others. Your organization can have Internet SSO and Identity-Enabled Web Services connections in days with point and click connection configuration, out-of-the-box integration capabilities, multi-protocol support, and automated user account management. Over 350 enterprises and service providers worldwide base their Internet identity security strategy on PingFederate.

SAP – The next release of SAP NetWeaver Identity Management 7.2 is planned for the second quarter 2010. SAP plans to significantly enhance the product with an Identity Provider (IdP) and Secure Token Service (STS) to support web-based Single Sign-On via SAML 2.0 assertions, identity federation and Single Sign-On for web services. The existing features to centrally administrate and provision users — provided by the Identity Center and Virtual Directory Server components — will be extended and allow for integrated scenarios with the IdP. The new IdP and STS will add access management features to the SAP NetWeaver Identity Management and allow the solution to be integrated into an Enterprise Single Sign-On environment reducing TCO and administrative effort.

Siemens – DirX Access V8.1 is a comprehensive solution that integrates access management, entitlement management, identity federation, Web services security, and Web Single Sign-on in one single product to protect your web applications and web services from unauthorized use. DirX Access provides for the consistent enforcement of business security policies through external, centralized, policy-based authentication and authorization services, enhances Web user experience through local and federated single sign-on and supports regulatory compliance with audit and reporting both within and across security domains.

About the Liberty Interoperable Program

The ongoing success of the Liberty Interoperable program is demonstrated by the wide scale deployment of SAML 2.0 products and the increasing number of businesses and governments such as the US GSA, now requiring vendors to pass Liberty Alliance testing. With nearly seven years of testing products for true interoperability of identity specifications, Liberty Alliance expects to expand the Liberty Interoperable program within Kantara Initiative to reflect growing momentum for proven interoperable multi-protocol identity solutions. More information about the program, including a list of all vendors who have passed Liberty Alliance testing, is available here.

Enterprises and governments are going to be able to do important projects and derive tangible benefits very quickly using this cross-vendor family of products.   That’s really important.  Of course, there’s more to identity than browser-based federation…  But one of the most encouraging signs is that the same kind of progress we see in the Kantara announcement is being made with the user-centric and privacy-enhancing technologies that many of us are working on to complement the SAML technology.

Back from vacation and catching up on some blogs I found this piece by Felix Gaehtgens at Kuppinger Cole in Germany:  

A good year ago, Microsoft acquired an innovative company called U-Prove. That company, founded by visionary Stephan Brandt, had come up with a privacy-enabling technology that effectively allows users to safely transmit the minimum required information about themselves when required to – and for those receiving the information, a proof that the information is valid. For example: if a country issued a digital identification card, and a service provider would need to check whether the holder over 18 years of age, the technology would allow to do just that – instead of having to transmit a full data set, including the age of birth. The technology works through a complex set of encryption and signing rules and is a win-win for both users who need to provide information as well as those taking it (also called “relying parties in geek speak”). With the acquisition of U-Prove, Microsoft now owns all of the rights to the technology – and more importantly, the associated patents with it. Stephan Brandt is now part of Microsoft’s identity team, filled with top-notch brilliant minds such as Dick Hardt, Ariel Gordon, Mark Wahl, Kim Cameron and numerous others.

Privacy advocates should (and are) happy about this technology because it effectively allows consumers to protect their information, instead of forcing them to give up unnecessary information to transact business. How many times have we needed to give up personal information for some type of service without any real need for this information? For example, if you’re not shipping anything to me… what’s the point of providing my home or address? If you are legally required to verify that I’m over 18 (or 21), why would you really need to know my credit card details and my home address? If you need to know that I am a customer of one of your partner banks, why would you also need to know my bank account number? Minimum disclosure makes transactions possible with exactly the right fit of personal details being exchanged. For those enterprises taking the data, this is also a very positive thing. Instead of having to “coax” unnecessary information out of potential customers, they can instead make a clear case of what information they do require for fulfilling the transaction, and will ultimately find consumers more willing to do business with them.

So all of this is really great. And what’s even better, Microsoft’s chief identity architect, Kim Cameron has promised not to “hoard” this technology for Microsoft’s own products, but to actually contribute it to society in order to make the Internet a better place. But more than one year down the line, Microsoft has not made a single statement about what will happen to U-Prove: minimum disclosure about its minimum disclose technology (pun intended!). In a post that I made a year ago, I tried making the point that this technology is so incredibly important for the future of the Internet, that Microsoft should announce its plans what do with the technology (and the patents associated for it).

Kim’s response was that Microsoft had no intentions of “hoarding” the technology for its own purposes. He highlighted however that it would take time to do this – time for Microsoft’s lawyers, executives and technologists to irk out the details of doing this.

Well – it’s been a year, and the only “minimum disclosure” that we can see is Microsoft’s unwillingness to talk about it. The debate is heating up around the world about different governments’ proposals for electronic passports and ID cards. Combined with the growing dangers of identity theft and continued news about spectacular leaks and thefts of personal information, this would really make our days. Unless you’re a spammer or identity thief of course.

So it’s about time Microsoft started making some statements to reassure all of us what is going to happen with the U-Prove technology, and – more importantly – with the patents. Microsoft has been reinventing itself and making a continuous effort to turn from the “bad guys of identity” a decade (in the old Hailstorm days with Microsoft Passport) into the “good guys” of identity with its open approach to identity and privacy protection and standardisation. At Kuppinger Cole we have loudly applauded the Identity Metasystem and Infocards as a ground-breaking innovation that we believe will transform the way we use the Internet in the years to come. Now is the time to really start off the transformative wave of innovation that comes when we finally address the dire need for privacy protection. Microsoft has the key in its hands, or rather, locked in a drawer. C’mon guys, when will that drawer finally be opened?

Kuppinger Cole has been an important force in creating awareness about the role of an Identity Metasystem. It has also led in stressing the importance of minimal disclosure technology. I take Felix’s concerns very seriously. He’s right - I owe people a progress report.

This said, there is no locked drawer. Instead, Felix gets closer to the real explanation in his first paragraph: “the technology works through a complex set of encryption and signing rules.”

The complexity must be tamed for the technology to succeed. There is more to this than brilliant formulas or crypto routines. We need to understand not only how minimal disclosure technology can be used - but how it can be made usable.

There are different kinds of research. Theoretical research is hugely important. But applied research is just as key. Over the last year we’ve moved from an essentially theoretical grasp of the possibilities to prototypes that demonstrate the feasibility of deploying real, large-scale distributed systems based on minimal disclosure.

I don’t have much time for standards and protocols that are NOT built on top of experience with implementation. And if you don’t know what your standards and implementations might look like, you can’t define the intellectual property requirements.

So we’ve been working hard on figuring this stuff out. In fact, a lot of progress has been made, and I’ll write about that in my next few posts. I’ll also reach out to anyone who wants to become more closely involved.

Here’s the most beautiful take yet on the Seven Laws of Identity - put together by Karon and Katrika, who even saw how the Laws connect with the Perception of Ailatan.  In the past people have asked why I didn’t do a Laws of Identity poster - this must be it.  Click to view full size.