Sorry, due to a recent surge in Trackbacks, I have deactivated this feature for the time being. Spammers are really an annoying bunch ...

What made it now just unbearable is that my blog was being misused to advertise the services of the worst health insurance that I ever had: United HealthCare. My conscience does not allow me to help this highly incompetent and - at times - immoral company in any way. It says a lot about a company (especially in HEALTH care) when they or their agents employ SPAM tactics to get people interested in their offer.

tag: blogging, spam, trackback

It seems that history is about to repeat itself: after Liberty formed, a lot of people wither felt left out or did not understand what all this 'identity stuff' was good for. Granted, Liberty was in 2002 about 5 years ahead of the rest of the market. At the time, I thought that this perception problem could be attributed to some abysmally bad marketing - I guess that this was only partially correct.

Today, the same complete lack of understanding is about to hit the "user-centric" identity community as well: Take a look at a post by Brian Huff and compare that with this post from Tim Bass (via James McGovern).

It seems astounding to me that both authors (who claim to be working in 'SOA') have so little understanding of the problems, technologies, and solutions in the identity space. Granted, I am a geek working in this area, but both Tim and Bex claim to be architects and decorate themselves with shiny titles (CTO, CISSP, Oracle ACE Director). They should know better.

Both advocate (in so many words) 'a simpler identity system' (heard that one before) and 'authentication - and that's it'. Both paint existing standards in a very bad light, describing them as 'immature, confusing and less-than-proven  security standards' or asking 'Makes you wonder why people bother to call them "standard," doesn't it?'.

Ok, guys you do not understand identity - get over it and hire someone who does. The good old days where everyone was getting ready for the global directory and its PKI are over. It's not only about authN and authZ in these days, but about the much bigger business and regulatory issue like trust or identity theft.

It seems that the larger identity community (Liberty, InfoCard, OpenID) is about to experience the same pushback that Liberty was facing initially. Let us hope that our joint communication efforts today will help to get over this 'perception gap'.

--

Here are a few comments regarding Brian's post:

1. CardSpace, OpenID, SXIP, (parts of) WS-*
Are not even by the widest possible definition standards, but rather a collection of protocol specifications. Some of these are even proprietary, IPR protected technologies (e.g. SXIP) that are not even covered by a NAC. Also, why are you not including real identity protocols by industry consortia, that are free to implement like e.g. ID-WSF?

2. SPML, XDAS
These OASIS standards have - per se - nothing to do with identity. They *touch* upon identity and security, but are not core to it. Otherwise you should also include HTTP, IMAP, SOAP, and even TCP.

3. LDAP, SAML 2, (parts of) WS-*, XACML
The are (in a wider sense) identity and security related standards. But so are many, many others (Kerberos, X.509, WSPL, XML-Enc, etc.) that you chose to omit. And interestingly enough, most of these standards build on each other or are complementary. So where is the issue?

4. The API issue
There is no unified, standadized API to all these protocols? For starters, only protocol organizations typically create protocols, not APIs (one notable exception is the GSS-API). If you want to create a 'standard' identity API, go to the JCP and suggest a JSR. That organization is probably the body with the biggest amount of standardized APIs, and it is - by most standards - fairly open today. On the other side, if you take the contract-first approach serious, every WSDL or SOAP profile is a reasonable API documentation. In fact this approach allows you select your platform of choice.

Regarding Tim's post:

His list of immature protocols is simply ridiculous: SAML - well established since 2001: go ask the Shib folks, who are running the larger chunk of the academic environment on this protocol. XML Enc and Dsig - yes, there are a few problems (authenticated encryption or key exchange), but none of these problems are insurmountable and have been solved for a long time.

tag: identity, saml

Wireshark can decrypt SSL traffic as long as you have the server private key. This can be extremely useful, if you have to debug HTTPS traffic and cannot use HTTP instead or put a MITM in the front (e.g. Windows CardSpace applications).

Unfortunately, the documentation on this feature is at this time rather thin. the wireshark wiki has one page dedicated to it (along with some sample traces - great to get started!!), but there is some information missing. This is what I did:

1. Make sure that the server private keys are in unencrypted PKCS#8 PEM format (RSA)

If in doubt, take a look at your key file. If it is binary, chances are that it is in a DER format which cannot be used with wireshark. Assuming that you have at least an PKCS#8 DER file, you can instruct openssl to convert this file for you:

openssl pkcs8 -nocrypt -in derfile.key -informat DER -out key.pem -outformat PEM

If your DER file is encrypted, you need decrypt the key with the right passphrase first. After you are done, you first line in the key.pem file should look like this:

-----BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY-----

2. Configure Wireshark to use this key

You have to go into the Preferences for SSL and configure the RSA key list. Check the wireshark wiki on how to do this. Make sure to specify the debug file - you really need this!

3. Capture you traffic and debug

If you now start to capture your traffic, you *should* be good to go. Make sure that you find a line like

ssl_init private key file c:\temp\key.pem successfully loaded

in you ssl debug line (at the top).

One particular issue that I had was that I got in the debug file for the first application packet the following debug output:

ssl_restore_session can't find stored session

This happens if your client talked to the server before you started the trace (or during an earlier trace) and some key exchange messages are missing. Restart your client (e.g. CardSpace or the browser) and the server, and you should be good to go. 

tag: ssl, network sniffing, wireshark

keytool is a useful utility for dealing with Java keystores, but it has a significant disadvantage: you can not export private keys with a certificate using keytool. Therefore, the only thing you can so is to add the certificate as a trustedCert into the keystore, but not as a keyEntry.

Obviously, this is easily possible through the programmatic interface, but that can be hasslesome at times. At http://couchpotato.net/pkeytool/ you can find a really nice little tool that allows you to extract the private key in a separate file, and then re-import the private key file and the cert into a new keystore.

tag: security, java, keytool

Ok - I just upgraded my blog engine to the 2.0 release of dasBlog. A big "Thank you!"
to the team for keeping up the great work.

One thing that does seem to work again is comments - so please giv it a try, if you like.

UPDATE: I just saw that the publishing times have been changed during the upgrade (or something else went wrong between the new version and Feedburner), so you will see a lot of new articles, that are not that new. Apologies.

Electronic health record are a very touchy subject, since these affect some of the most personal data. While a usable and reliable system for such electronic records would certainly save a lot of money and also prevent even more health-care related mistakes, the Microsoft HealthVault solution is probably the very worst way of trying to solve these problems.

Do not get me wrong - I do applaud Microsoft for trying to push this effort ahead, so that we (as a society) can make progress towards a reasonable solution. But a centralized (one is tempted to say: totalitarian), Passport-like data sink for my most personal data does not even sound bad to me^[1]. Here are a couple of questions that came to my mind immediately after reading the announcement:

• Why would I trust an unrelated and (health records wise) completely unexperienced company trust with my health records?

• What happens in case of a data breach?

• Why should I consent to having my data shipped to *any* other country?

• Why is Microsoft only worried about third party "Program" provider satisfying *their* Privacy Policy needs and not mine.

• What happens if health related surfing habits are harvested not through the HealthVault web site, but through the *required* Microsoft Passport account?

The list could go on and on after reading the boiler plate privacy policy. I just cannot understand why Microsoft is pressing forward into this area without taking much more caution to prevent security breaches (ha: they are using SSL and strong passwords!!) and limit liability. In this area (particularly when dealing with super personal data like real-time live sign data) there is no "get it right the third time".

Paul Madsen made a very good point of this area of application being ideally suited for Liberty technologies. I think that data as sensitive as medical records should be regulated to only be kept in federations: without my explicit consent data should not move from one silo (doctor A) to any other (doctor B or insurance). In fact, the way the (ineffective, but privacy preserving) way health care works today is a federation model.

tag: healthvault

[1] I am really in a Pauli mood today.

Dare Obasanjo offers a very balanced view on the recent announcement by Microsoft to release the .NET 3.5 source under a highly restrictive license. He writes:

This is one of those announcements I find hard to get excited about. Any developer who’s been frustrated by the weird behavior of a .NET Framework class and has wanted to look at it’s code, should already know about Lutz Roeder’s Reflector which is well known in the .NET devoper community. So I’m not sure who this anouncement is actually intended to benefit.

The Microsoft Reference License says:

"Reference use" means use of the software within your company as a reference, in read only form, for the sole purposes of debugging your products, maintaining your products, or enhancing the interoperability of your products with the software, and specifically excludes the right to distribute the software outside of your company.

So, if you look at the source code for .NET you better stop working on *any* plumbing or infrastructure code, because you might get tainted. Why are they doing this? I'd rather see the .NET code going under a GPL license, or even a BSD derivative.

Microsoft R-L is NOT open source - it is not even closed source Or, to use a Wolfgang Pauli expression: "This is so bad, it is not even wrong."

tag: opensource, .NET, Microsoft

I just ran across this song (from 2006) called "Download this Song" by MC Lars. You can certainly debate the quality of the song itself (although I still very much like "The Passenger"), but the point he is trying to make is probably quite right: 10 years from now, CDs will probably be considered either audiophile, totally redundant, or both. Popular music will at that time be produced, promoted, distributed, and listened to online.

However, I doubt that the small, but dedicated group of people interested in classical, contemporary, or Jazz music will be that easily converted - at least not without CD equivalent (or better) download offers.

Anyway, here is the video:

tag: humor, music, audio

Kim writes about the recent Beta announcement^[1] at Windows Live! about them accepting Windows CardSpace InfoCards for authentication. Having gone through rolling out an extensive public new and experimental Identity System deployment myself (Lauren is currently writing about that), I can appreciate the work that Kim and his colleagues are putting in.

In the interest of distilling use cases for Project Concordia and other venues it seems worth pointing out that - in this deployment - Windows CardSpace is being used solely as an authentication system: You can associate any Windows CardSpace card (only PPID is required) with your account - all other attributes are still being handled by the backend systems of Windows Live!. Any additional attributes that your Windows CardSpace card can provide will not be used for authentication or authorization.

This is very much in line with my description of the "glorified HTTP Redirect" use case of Windows CardSpace: here the secure UI on the client can actually help in preventing phishing attacks. The biggest competitor for this use case is OpenID which offers (roughly) the same features, but employs a radically different approach at solving the authentication problem. With PAPE it is somewhat more phishing resistant, but at this point, the CardSpace-based identity systems have - from my perspective - a clear lead in this area over OpenID.

Both authentication technologies face however that same issues: they allow delegation of responsibility for authentication and a rudimentary attribute exchange mechanism. But they do not address the need of service providers to maintain ownership of attributes about their users, except in trivial cases. For these - business driven - issues you need a framework that allows advanced models of federation and account linking and  - most importantly - goes beyond protocols and addresses the non-technical aspects of identity management as well.

I think it will be quite interesting which authentication technology (OpenID and Windows CardSpace) will get how much market space. OpenID has a head start as far as IdPs and community acceptance goes, but Windows CardSpace has the backing of Microsoft and - starting with Windows Server 2008 - a REALLY large number of relying parties.

tag: identity, OpenID, WCS, interoperability

[1] The service has been available for some time now.

Just to satisfy myself that the Solaris 10 U4 iSCSI target is working well, I fired up a few file system stress test processes to see if the Solaris machine (and the iSCSI initiator) hold up.

For the test itself, I took an old but reasonably reliable SQL Server hard drive test (can be downloaded e.g. from here). I took the default parameters with medium workload (100MB files), especially since my test drive was a virtual machine on my laptop. Write caching was off. The purpose of this test was not to create a performance evaluation or a real stress test, but much more a proof-of-concept that the two systems would work together.

Here is the final result:

The next step would be a full stress test, preferably with at least 3 or 4 high-powered drivers. That might take some time, though. Meanwhile: happy SAN building.

tag: windows, iSCSI, Solaris