This afternoon is the start of the Internet Identity Workshop in Mountain View. I am giving an overview of Identity 2.0 and what we are doing at Sxip Identity. We had been thinking about what are the key success factors for an Identity 2.0 and have come up with the following:
- Internet scale
- Community driven
- Easy to adopt
- Privacy protecting
I will expand more on these in a later posting.
We have also gotten feedback that the terms that we use in SXIP were not as descriptive as they could be, so we have come up with new ones:
- Identity Agent
- Identity Consumer
- Identity Issuer
Identity Agent is the software that manages your identity for you and is where you authenticate. It may be a website (Homesite) or software running on your own machine or some combination of both.
Identity Consumer is the site that is requesting your identity data. The SXIP term for this was Membersite. Member implies some membership and was not really descriptive of what the site did. Relying Party implies that the identity data received is asserted or verified. The identity data may just be my list of favorite books. OpenID uses the term Consumer, and we thought that was descriptive and a better match.
Identity Issuer is the site that issues claims or assertions. Identity Provider in the Liberty sense is a combination of the Identity Agent and the Identity Issuer, so for clarity, that term was not used. Also, since the functionality is scoped to issuing claims, Identity Issuer is more specific. Passel uses the term Issuer as well.
The problem we are working to solve is how does the user move around the credentials. Self asserted ones are useful, but as you point out, 3rd party credentials from trusted issuers is much more powerful.
Our vision is that as an infrastructure becomes available for moving the credentials, the providers will come online.
VeriSign has a similar vision as we do around where does the world need to end up. Can’t comment on VeriSign’s plans, but at Sxip we hope that they move to using SXIP soon.
I’ve been following the glacial movement of ID online for years and there is no question, you guys get it but one thing I’ve been wondering since seeing the video is this: Don’t you need some high-reliability credential providers – governments, banks etc on board before the real power of the system comes into use? Obviously you need the users and the receptors of the ID as well but if the providers lack credibility the whole system doesn’t service it’s purpose. How are you going to address this?
Hi Dick,
Love the Apple-talk-type presentations!
I am confused.
What is the difference between Verisign’s PIP (http://pip.verisignlabs.com/) and a homesite? I was thinking of your latest presentation with all of the Dicks. You showed Versign, Homesite and Membersite.
By Verisign’s description, it sounds like the same thing you described as a Homesite. The other thing is that Verisign talks about it being based on OpenID. Is that compatible with sxip or are you working with Verisign to become a sxip authority???
Thanks!