At EIC2008 last month, Dale Olds of Novell’s Bandit Project gave me a few minutes and some insight into how Novell (and others) are mixing open source with proprietary software to architect a whole new Identity paradigm online.
I’ve been following the user-centric Identity movement ever since Doc Searls talked me into attending IIW2006b, an unconference. EIC is a classic Enterprise technology sales conference on identity management. The two events couldn’t be more different, even though both have excellent content and are focused on Identity. EIC was all about big business selling to each other, while IIW is all about engineers making user-centric Identity work.
Identity? A lot of you are familiar with the term, but for those who might not know what I mean, I’m talking about how people authenticate themselves for access to online systems. Traditionally based on usernames and passwords, online Identity presents a host of problems, not the least of which is that an individual may have dozens or even hundreds of different usernames and passwords, one for each new web service or corporate LAN accessed. This proliferation is itself a security risk–as people reuse passwords despite the best efforts of zealous IT gurus everywhere. It is also an information management nightmare: how are we supposed to remember all of that? Which reinforces the problem of reused passwords and unfortunately typically insecure password reset. Today’s identity management software provides solutions to this problem, largely through federation and user-centric Identity.
In short, federation is how corporate IT systems rely on other corporate systems–provided by other departments or even other companies–to authenticate your identity and share information about you. It can be used for authentication, or as in the case of FaceBook’s Beacon, it can be used to pass on highly sensitive personal data. (Blockbuster is now in a lawsuit over this, which I expect they’ll lose.) As Doc Searls likes to put it, federation is about large companies having safe sex with each other, using your data. You can see how this starts to relate to your offline identity, as bits and pieces of your data trail could be used to build a profile and steal your identity or use it for other nefarious purposes, like spamming you with “targeted” ads.
In contrast, user-centric Identity is an architecture where individuals present the credentials of their choice for authentication at online services. Instead of the vendor-to-vendor systems integration and trust contracts of federation, “Relying Parties” authenticate a visitor by relying on the Identity services of an “Identity Provider” of the visitor’s choice. Relying parties may not accept all ID Providers, but in general, the choice of who authenticates your identity lies with you. Key technologies in this space are OpenID, InfoCards, and a variety of standards from the Liberty Alliance. These are the core of the conversation at IIW.
Of course, you can do federation with a user-centric Identity architecture; that’s not the point. The point is that in the user-centric world, the user is in charge of their identity. Or, as Doc Searls advocates, in the user-driven world, the user is driving the transaction.
So, when I sat down with Dale at EIC, I had already heard about Bandit—I even have the t-shirt—yet, I was wondering how Bandit fit into the whole mash up of technology behind user-centric Identity. I know that OpenID is a URL-based approach for identity that has generated significant traction because it is easy for relying parties to implement and for tech savvy users to use. I also know that Higgins and CardSpace both implement Information Cards, or InfoCards: one an open source, extendable client and server implementation, the other a polished proprietary client app from Microsoft. I even had some inkling of the various protocols created and under development by the Liberty Alliance, who started life as a federation standards group and has embraced user-centric approaches as it builds out its services stack. And I even knew about Sxipper and Vidoop, the first a client application that helps users manage their identity presentation online, whether the online services are user-centric or not, and the latter an Identity Provider with a unique method for verifying that you are you.
But what I didn’t quite get was how Bandit fit into it all. I know they are supporters of Higgins and Information Cards, but is Bandit a client app like Sxipper? A card selector like CardSpace? Is it a server implementation that could be used by companies like Vidoop? Is it open source and if so, how does it fit into Novell’s business model?
Dale was able to make it fairly clear: Bandit is an open source project supported by Novell. Bandit provided the card selector for the Higgins project and participate in OSIS (Open Source Identity Systems), a working group of the Identity Commons comprised of different Identity technology providers working towards interoperability. They also support the soon to be announced InfoCard Foundation, although there have been no official announcements by anyone yet about that particular project. Novell, as a separate entity, is putting engineering and organizational resources into these open source and interoperability efforts because they see a bright future in selling Identity management tools once we get the Internet Identity-enabled.
That’s when the light went on. Bandit is about helping create the entire infrastructure of Identity, the Identity Meta-System, as Kim Cameron calls it. Once that infrastructure is in place, Novell will be able to sell companies a number of tools that make it easy to leverage that infrastructure. As Dale put it, the open source part of this is about enabling Identity: assuring that the basic plumping and services are present and understood. The subsequent business model is helping companies manage identity, once we have the essential plumbing in place.
Think of it like http and HTML as enabling the world-wide-web, while products like Cold Fusion, IIS, and Drupal help companies manage web services. The web wouldn’t exist without the open source gift from CERN some fifteen years ago, and without that underlying plumbing of protocols and formats, software providers like Netscape, Microsoft, IBM, Sun, and Novell, wouldn’t have made a dollar selling web technologies to anyone. Instead, with a web-enabled world, literally thousands of companies competed to provide web software, making billions of dollars in the process.
Novell sees a similar dynamic with Identity. Clearly, so does Microsoft and Sun, and hundreds of other companies.
So do I. And it looks pretty damn cool from here.
p.s. my apologies for the lack of links and images. I realized I better post this before the real-time world overtakes me. I hope to see a bunch of you at IIW
p.s. bonus link: Doc Searls on vendors bankrolling open source.
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