... since I joined Sun. Actually 10 years almost to the date, so Bill presented my 10 year recognition certificate to me today.

It has been a very interesting 10 years: I started out as a pre-sales systems engineer in Frankfurt, Germany, moved to the U.S. in 2000 to work with the Sun Legal team (mostly) and then joined the Business Alliances group in 2005.

From this point a big "Thank you" to everyone who I worked with on this journey.

tag: Sun

Another one done. IIW 2007b is over, and - overall - it was quite productive for me.

The biggest takeaway for me is that Concordia and OSIS have made - in my mind - a major step towards harmonization and better coordination. This was reflected in the results of the OSIS steering committee meeting on Wednesday and the following two sessions on Concordia. I am glad that all participants recognized the value of both organizations. As Mike Jones put it, it helps that there is significant overlap in the members.

Other progress was made as well by both groups - the OSIS interop planning session was very fruitful, especially since the planning committee prepared an excellent laundry list document consolidating all test that are in the planning for RSA. I heard great things about the Monday Concordia meeting (which I was unfortunately unable to attend), but also the Use Case session on Wednesday with Paul and Mike was extremely productive.

Finally, the OpenID folks are to be mentioned for making a breakthrough with their 2.0 release, including their IPR regime. I took the Liberty (sic!) to capture the moment that David et al. have been waiting for more than a year:

Overall, the atmosphere seemed a lot mellower, but I can not really follow Dave's conclusions - especially concerning his comments about Concordia and OSIS.

tag: iiw2007b, osis, project concordia

Not only that a lot of people have been complaining about my funky ports, but by Internet provider also decided to start blocking the 8080 port. That's somewhat of a problem, since without this port my blog will not work. Sigh!

I therefore decided to bite the bullet and start using a professional ASP.NET hoster. So please update your links and feed readers to my new blog address:

HTML: http://blog.beuchelt.org/
Feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/WebServicesContraptions

Thank you for your understanding.

tag: blogging

UPDATE: My ISP allows inbound connections on 8080 again, so now I was able to put a redirection in ... Hope that helps. The only thing bugging me right now is that Technorati does not allow me to claim this blog on the new address ... sigh.

So, the long family vacation has been on for over 2 weeks, and it really feels good to unwind a little. We started on Big Island, went on to Kauai (where I got - after 28 years of planning on doing this - my diving certification with KAS^[1]), and are now on O'ahu. The differences between these islands never cease to amaze me. Here are a few pictures that we have put up so far:


Snow and Telescopes on Mauna Kea


The evening view from our balcony on Hawai'i


Me after hiking to the top of the dormant Pu'u Huluhulu


Sunset on Kaua'i on Turkey Day


Waimea River Canyon

[1] My experience with KAS was really superb. I had Damion McGinley as my instructor - he was fun and relaxed, but still made me go through alll the drills over and over again. One of the best things was that he knew the area and the aquatic wildlife quite well, so I got to see many critters and turtles.

Over the next few weeks blogging will be light, since I am traveling. I hope to be back to here for IIW...

Mike made a very good remark on the OSIS General mailing list that seems relevant to the discussion between Pam, Paul, and myself about assurance in distributed security:

There's a reason that self-issued cards didn't provide any ability to transmit a credit card number or national ID number. The good news is that Identity Providers sending such sensitive information are likely to not be willing to transmit it to relying parties they don't have a business relationship with. Once you're using managed cards for payment rather than typing credit card numbers into web forms, you'll definitely have additional layers of protection working for you. [...]

I fully agree with Mike here: as fas as I understand, Mike is describing the IdP deployment model that Paul and I have been championing over the use of self-asserted cards for sensitive attributes.

tag: assurance, identity, cardspace

Paul found an "periodic" table of data visualizations, which is quite nice in its own right (Paul: I think I have seen a knowledge map of the identity landscape some time ago). But I certainly prefer this "periodic" table of ... beers (hmmm).

tag: humor, beer

Through Nico Williams a real interoperability story:

Alan Wright reports that the Solaris team recently completed the Solaris kernel CIFS service. That's right: CIFS (i.e. Windows networking) is now on par with NFS and other kernel-level system services. To be able to achieve this goal, the Solaris folks had to create some really innovative pieces of technology:

• To allow Windows style SIDs in the process credentials, they are now allowing negative and ephemeral UIDs and GIDs.
  
• ZFS now supports all kinds of DOS attributes and full NTFS ACLs, i.e. ordered ACEs with SIDs.
  

All persistent data (like filesystem records) are dealing with actual SIDs, while non-persistent kernel and memory objects are using the ephemeral negative UIDs. The later are not stable across a reboot, but an ID mapping daemon performs the necessary translation between the SID and its UID.

With this new technology on the horizon, my new home project on a Solaris storage appliance for the basement ("Codename Filer") looks brighter than ever ...

tag: interoperability, cifs, solaris

... that I will not let anybody break my windows - also, they seem to be a little stronger than the Jones' windows, at least the big one in the spotlight.

In the latest round, Pamela explains how a particular authentication should be considered to have a particular level of assurance. Paul takes the time to address some of the issues Pamela raises, but before we loose track of where we started, I would like to point back to the initial discussion between Pam and Paul:

Paul wrote:

In discussing Cardspace's relaxation of the SSL requirement for RPs, Pam writes

We now theoretically will have three different assurance levels going, based on three different ssl certificate levels (no certs, regular certs, and HA certs).

For there to be 3 Cardspace assurance levels would imply that the LoA is the same for self-asserted and managed cards. Is this the case?

Pam originally thought about three levels of assurance that were bound to the level of the certificates: none, regular, EV^[1]. Paul noted that the level of assurance depends on a number of factors, with technology and deployment architecture only having a small part in this. Paul and I then tried to elaborate in more detail how technical and non-technical factors affect the assurance an user and a RP can place into the transaction.

The reason I started this discussion was that - in my mind - the security certificate used in a particular authentication or authorization transaction is essentially only one reputation factor: by wielding an SSL or EV certificate you demonstrate that a particular company (the CA) thinks that you are who you say you are. This certainly affects assurance, but - by itself - it is rather useless.

The identity provider model (which derives from the mutual trust model in Kerberos) adds a very significant layer to the assurance model: It goes beyond the generic assurance by e.g. a CA by offering information (authentication, attributes) about a particular group of users - the IdP is by far more specific than the CA. Additionally - as Paul points out - a trustworthy IdP is typically a company with deep pockets - someone a RPor an user can sue for damages if something goes wrong. Note that the Windows CardSpace system support such an IdP deployment by using managed cards with Issuer policy. I expect this to be the default deployment for CardSpace, if it gets selected by large organizations.

Self-issued cards or managed cards from any IdP (the OpenID model) do not offer the comfort of sueable deep pockets to the RP. A RP that trusts an authentication that is done by anyone but himself will find himself in a rather dangerous situation: if something goes terribly wrong (e.g. some nasty mal-ware rootkit stole my self-asserted cards along with usage logs and sent them to a criminal for use with my bank) the burden is then on the RP to prove that the authentication token it received did not originate at my Windows CardSpace client, but at the criminal's computer. In an IdP model this burden is with the IdP^[2].

Thus with all respect to Pam's critique, I do have to insist on my original point: the technical factors (like an EV cert or lack thereof) play some role in the level of assurance, but only to establish a baseline. What allows RPs and their customers to truly trust in an identity system are the deployment parameters (including such "mundane" but at least equally important things as e.g. physical security), and - most importantly - the established mechanisms of society for enforcement, arbitration, and liability management.

tag: assurance, cardspace, identity

[1] By the way: the recognition that different types of security certificates might even on influence the assurance you have about a transaction invalidates Ben Laurie's argument that third parties do not add additional assurance.

[2] If I were a cynic, I'd might come up with this argument: Since there is likely a contract between a RP and an IdP, and the IdP has all kinds of lawyers working for them and an interest in precting itself and its users (to a degree), the RP would actually be much better off with self-issued cards: if something breaks, the RP can

• blame the end-user about their lack of security precaution and sue them for negligence,
  
• rest assured that no large number of lawyers will counter-sue them,
• offer the end-user a token of reparations ("We will cover 50% of your losses") and earn tons of goodwill for marketing purposes.
  

Fortunately, I am not a cynic.

Paul Trevithick just announced that Higgins will start developing a SAML 2.0 compliant card selector, that will - in addition to Windows CardSpace compatible i-cards - support SAML 2.0 compatible "s-cards"^[1]. This will be quite interesting to follow, in particular if Higgins really supports the SAML 2.0 protocol (not only the token format). In that case it would really step up to be part of the identity meta system (actually: the Aleph 0 Identity System ).

PS: Welcome in the blogosphere, Paul!

tag: saml, identity, higgins, liberty

[1] Paul Madsen made some interesting remarks about that name...

Microsoft made the ruling of the Court of First Instance in Europe available on their web site... this condenses 5 years of my work life into a single document.

tag: Microsoft

Paul and Pam seem to think that my stance on assurances and trust is hard-line.

No Assurance vs. Pseudonymity

Paul seems to agree with me to some extend while noting that a concept like self-issued cards can establish a stable pseudonym. I agree with this: both the Windows CardSpace system, as well as OpenID produce in their basic usage scenarios^[1] stable pseudonyms - not more, not less. But this conveys nothing about the identity of the user controlling this pseudonym. It is purely an authentication process that takes place, with no authorization data being exchanged. In fact, all authorization takes place within the RP system, solely based on the pseudonym. I called that the "No assurance" level, which is - a little - harsh, but still fair.

Pseudonymity and Low-Value Transactions

Pam has more issues with my analysis: initially, she finds it strange that "No assurance", pseudonym-only level of assurance is acceptable at all. Again, I might have been somewhat extreme in my wording: when speaking about "No assurance" I was speaking about a situation, where some authentication, but no authorization took place. So you do have (as Paul pointed out) a stable pseudonym, but absolutely no reliable information beyond that. This, I find completely acceptable to what I coined "low-value transactions" like forums, blog commenting, etc.

Trusting an IdP

Now Pam goes on to point out, that an arbitrary managed card provider has - beyond the certificate that confirms the identity of the IdP to only some extend  - no other trustworthiness to them, making them practically as unreliable as a self-issued card.

I agree totally. That is why I insisted in my earlier article that in order to gain any confidence in the token, the RP has really no other choice but to set the sp:IssuedToken/sp:Issuer (3.1.1 [ISIP 07]) to a WSA Endpoint that the RP is willing to trust. This trust is established through non-technical means, e.g through contracts, reputation systems, etc. But without this tying of the authentication to an IdP you have at least some trust in, you cannot have any reasonable level of assurance about your attributes.

The Energy Level Diagram of Assurance

Thus, I also agree with Kim: assurance is not binary - quite the opposite. For reasons of brevity (and laziness 8-)) I only focused on the two major categories of assurance for authenticated session. So here is now a somewhat more complete picture:

Please note that in this picture "No assurance" refers to completely anonymous transactions (no authentication), while the former level of that name is now name "Pseudonymity".

At the end of the day, however, I come back to the same point I made in my earlier post: technology (as long as it is not blatantly broken, i.e. insecure) bears no significant role in establishing trust or assurance. You cannot create a technology that has "built-in" trust - any technology can be deployed in a completely untrustworthy way.

Even a technology-centric system like SSL rests on the trustworthiness of the browser programmers (that put roots in the CA stores) and the CA companies themselves.

tag: identity, assurance, cardspace

[1] Windows CardSpace: self-asserted cards, OpenID: OpenID Auth 1.1 + SimpleReg 1.0

[ISIP 07]   Arun Nanda, "Identity Selector Interoperability Profile V1.0", Microsoft, April 2007