Security/identity · 2010-09-10

Making identity portable in the cloud

Yesterday I had the opportunity to contribute to BrightTALK’s day-long Cloud Security Summit with a webcast called Making Identity Portable in the Cloud.

Some 30 live attendees were very patient with my Internet connection problems, meaning that the slides (large PDF) didn’t advance when they were supposed to and I couldn’t answer questions live. However the good folks at BrightTALK fixed up the recording to match the slides to the audio, and I thought I’d offer thoughts here on the questions raised.

“Framework provider – sounds suspiciously like an old CA (certificate authority) in the PKI world! Why not just call it a PKI legal framework?” Yeah, there’s nothing new under the sun. The circles of trust, federations, and trust frameworks I discussed share a heritage with the way PKIs are managed. But the newer versions have the benefit of lessons learned (compare the Federal Bridge and the Open Identity Solutions for Open Government initiative) and are starting to avail themselves of technologies that fit modern Web-scale tooling better (like the MDX metadata exchange work, and my new favorite toy, hostmeta). PKI is still quite often part of the picture, just not the whole picture.

“How about a biometric binding of the individual to the process and the requirement of separation of roles?” I get nervous about biometric authentication for many purposes because it binds to the bag of protoplasm and not the digital identity (and because some of the mechanisms are actually rather weak). If different roles and identities could be separated out appropriately and then mapped, that helps. But with looser coupling come costs and risks that have to be managed.

“LDAP, AD, bespoke, or a combination?” Interestingly, this topic was hot at the recent Cloud Identity Summit (a F2F event, unlike the BrightTALK one). My belief is that some of today’s tiny companies are going to outsource all their corporate functions to SaaS applications; they will thrive on RESTfulness, NoSQL, and eventual consistency; and some will grow large, never having touched traditional directory technology. I suspect this idea is why Microsoft showed up and started talking about what’s coming after AD and touting OData as the answer. (Though in an OData/GData deathmatch, I’d probably bet on the latter…)

Thanks to all who attended, and keep those cards and letters coming.