OpenID with Strong Authentication

It’s the season of political campaigns. And in this season, the vernacular of campaigning begin to swell into other areas- with front runners, presumptive nominees, comeback winners, and so forth.

For instance, we’ve learned recently the HD-DVD has dropped out of the HD format war; Blu-Ray is declared the apparent victor.

Well, in this same spirit, Paul at In Context analyzes the standards campaigning in the digital public identifier area, which at this point can be reduced to i-name vs. OpenID. In short, he finds that OpenID is not only running a better campaign, but really offers a better value:

OpenIDs offer something to people that i-cards don’t. Even run of the mill, freebie, URL-based OpenIDs give you a public identifier that you feel like you own. And the i-name flavor of OpenIDs give you a public identifier that you really do own cuz you’re not locked in to a particular OpenID provider.

OpenID is the winning, lightweight, technology for public, low-value transactions.

• Why winning? The OpenID community blended together the three competing lightweight technologies (LID, OpenID, and i-names) into a unified specification, community, code, and foundation.
• Why public? Because the appealing notion of having OpenID URI that’s mine (e.g. “=paul.trevithick”) also has the side-effect of projecting the same identifier to every relying site allowing me to be easily tracked. To be fair, there is a “directed identity” feature of OpenID that I can use to prevent this–I can just type in the URI of my OpenID OP instead. But I still think the perception is that an OpenID is mostly public.
• Why low-value? Because its simple and lightweight architecture does not incorporate a client component, end-to-end crypto, anti-phishing protection, etc. necessary to support higher value transactions and other privacy-enhancing features. But its great for logging in to blogs, etc.

Now, if OpenID does become the de factor public identifier, i-names would be an apt potential running mate.

Aaron Topance on big league OpenID providers that don’t accept OpenIDs from other providers:

There seems to be a trend, as of recently, for large companies to become OpenID providers, but now allow logging into their service with your OpenID account. The trend I’m noticing, is everyone wants to be a provider, but no one wants to support OpenID logins. Well not “no one”, but not the major players. Consider the following major corporations or web sites that are OpenID providers:

• America Online
• Orange
• LiveJournal and Vox
• WordPress.com
• Yahoo!
• Blogger
• Verisign
• … and more

Supposedly, news has hit the front that Microsoft will be supporting OpenID as a provider, and rumors have it that your GMail account can be used as an OpenID identity. But what about logging into these providers with an existing identity? Here’s the question posed: Can I login to AOL, or create and AOL account, with an already existing OpenID identity? What about LiveJournal? WordPress? Yahoo!? Blogger? etc.

There’s an interesting discussion on Mark Evan’s blog about the potential of a killer application for OpenID:

One of the biggest challenges facing OpenID is it’s a solution (universal identity management) looking for a problem to solve.

Sure, it’s a pain having to remember different usernames and passwords (unless you lazily use the same ones for everything) but most people don’t see it as a huge issue, which means OpenID has failed to gain much traction. And to be frank, that won’t change much even with major players such as Google, Yahoo and AOL starting to climb on the OpenID bandwagon recently.

One of the applications the Evan’s points to with some enthusiasm is PageOnce, which is a universal dashboard for the web.

Johannes Ernst’s discuses the business ramifications of Yahoo joining the OpenID space:

Instead of being a technical curiosity, web businesses can now assume that the majority of their visitors have an OpenID. Okay, Yahoo and AOL and Blogger and all of the existing implementations don’t add up to more than 50% of internet users, but you can bet that more telcos become OpenID providers for their broadband customers, as Orange showed, and that all major internet portals, Microsoft and Google included, will offer OpenIDs with each of their accounts shortly. (It’s easy for them to do, and they don’t want to lose even one of their subscribers for the reason that they didn’t add a small bit of code to their site, that, boy, might even benefit them strategically, and not just create competitive parity.) It’s a very safe assumption for web businesses that by the time they can do anything about OpenID, regardless how fast they move, more than 50% of their visitors will have an OpenID, and Yahoo!’s move yesterday made that a virtual certainty.