Implications Of OpenID (Google Tech Talk)

The implications of Simon Willison Google Tech Talk, 25th June 2007

Who here has used OpenID?

Who uses it regularly?

What is OpenID?

OpenID is a decentralised mechanism for Single Sign On

What problems does it solve?

“Too many passwords!”

“Someone else already grabbed my username”

“My online proﬁle is scattered across dozens of sites”

What is an OpenID?

An OpenID is a URL

http://swillison.livejournal.com/

http://simonw.myopenid.com/

http://simonwillison.net/

http://openid.aol.com/simonwillison/

What can you do with an OpenID?

You can claim that you own it

You can prove that claim

Why is that useful?

You can use it for authentication

“Who the heck are you?!”

“I’m simonwillison.net”

“prove it!”

(magic happens)

“OK, you’re in!”

So it’s a bit like Microsoft Passport, then?

Yes, but you don’t need to ask their permission to implement it

And Microsoft don’t get to own your credentials

Who does get to own them?

You, the user, decide.

You pick your own provider

(just like e-mail)

So I’m still giving someone the keys to my kingdom?

Yes, but it can be someone you trust

If you have the ability to run your own server software, you can do it for yourself.

OK, how do I use it?

So my users don’t have to sign up for an account?

Not necessarily

An OpenID tells you very little about a user

You don’t know their name

You don’t know their e-mail address

You don’t know if they’re a person or an evil robot

(or a dog)

Where do I get that information from?

You ask them!

OpenID can even help them answer

How can I tell if they’re an evil spambot?

Same as usual: challenge them with a CAPTCHA

So how does OpenID actually work?

“I’m simonwillison.myopenid.com”

Site fetches HTML, discovers identity provider

Establishes shared secret with identity provider (Using Difﬁe-Hellman key exchange)

Redirects you to the identity provider

If you’re logged in there, you get redirected back

How does my identity provider know who I am?

OpenID deliberately doesn’t specify

username/password is common

But providers can use other methods if they want to

Client SSL certiﬁcates

Out of band authentication via SMS, e-mail or Jabber

IP based login restrictions

(one guy set that up using DynDNS)

SecurID keyfobs

No authentication at all (just say “Yes”)

Just say “yes”?

Yup. That’s the OpenID version of bugmenot.com

http://www.jkg.in/openid/

Users can give away their passwords today - this is just the OpenID equivalent

What if I decide I hate my provider?

Use your own domain name

Delegate to a provider you trust

Support for delegation is compulsory

This minimises lock in

So everyone will end up with one OpenID that they use for everything?

Probably not

(I have half a dozen OpenIDs already)

People like maintaining multiple online personas

professional social secret ...

OpenID makes it easier to manage multiple online personas

Three accounts is still better than three dozen

If an OpenID is just a URL, is there anything else interesting you can do with it?

Yes. Different OpenIDs can express different things

My AOL OpenID proves my AIM screen name

An OpenID from sun.com proves that someone is a current Sun employee

A last.fm OpenID could incorporate my taste in music

My LiveJournal OpenID tells you where to ﬁnd my blog

... and a FOAF ﬁle listing my friends

doxory.com uses this for contact imports

Why is OpenID worth implementing over all the other identity standards?

It’s simple

Unix philosophy: It solves one, tiny problem

It’s a dumb network

Many of the competing standards are now on board

Isn’t putting all my eggs in one basket a really bad idea?

Bad news: chances are you already do

“I forgot my password” means your e-mail account is already an SSO mechanism

OpenID just makes this a bit more obvious

What about phishing?

Phishing is a problem

I can has lolcats!? BETA Make your own lolcats! lol Sign in with your OpenID: OpenID: Sign in http://icanhascheezburger.com/2007/05/16/i-has-a-backpack/

Fake edition Your identity provider Username and password, please! Username: Password: Log in

Identity theft :(

An untrusted site redirects you to your trusted provider

Sound familiar?

PayPal Yahoo! BBAuth Google Auth Google Checkout

You guys already need to solve that problem!

One solution: don’t let the user log in on the identity provider “landing page”

Better solutions

CardSpace

Native browser support for OpenID (e.g. SeatBelt)

Competition between providers

Permanent cookie set using out-of-band token

Best practices for OpenID consumers?

“I forgot my password” becomes “I can’t sign in with my OpenID”

Allow multiple OpenIDs to be associated with a single account

People can still sign in if one of their providers is down

People can un-associate an OpenID without locking themselves out

You can take advantage of site-speciﬁc services around each of their OpenIDs

Any other neat tricks?

Portable contact lists

Facebook (and others) currently ask for the user’s Google username and password

I don’t need to tell you why that’s a horrible idea

Lightweight accounts

Pre-approved accounts

Social whitelists

OpenID and microformats

Decentralised social networks?

“People keep asking me to join the LinkedIn network, but I’m already part of a network, it’s called the Internet.” Gary McGraw, via Jon Udell, via Gavin Bell

Doesn’t this outsource the security of my users to untrusted third parties?

Yes it does. But...

... so do “forgotten password” e-mails!

If e-mail is secure enough for your user’s authentication, so is OpenID

Password e-mails are essentially SSO with a deliberately bad user experience

What are the privacy implications?

Cross correlation of accounts

Don’t publish a user’s OpenID without making it clear that you’re going to do that

Allow users to opt-out of sharing their OpenID

The online equivalent of a credit reporting agency?

This could be built today by sites conspiring to share e-mail addresses

IANAL, but legal protections against this already exist

“Directed identity” in OpenID 2.0 makes it easy to use a different OpenID for every site

Patents?

Sun and VeriSign have both announced “patent covenants”

They won’t smack you down with their patents for using OpenID 1.1

They will smack down anyone else who asserts their own patents against OpenID

Who else is involved?

(Slide borrowed from David Recordon)

AOL - provider, full consumer by end of July

Microsoft: Bill Gates expressed their interest at the RSA conference

(mainly as good PR for CardSpace?)

Sun: Patent Covenant, 33,000 employees

Six Apart

VeriSign

JanRain

Yahoo! - indirectly

Google?

http://openid.net/ http://www.openidenabled.com/ http://simonwillison.net/tags/openid/

Thank you

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Implications Of OpenID (Google Tech Talk)

by Simon Willison, CEO and Co-Founder at Lanyrd

on Jun 27, 2007

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Implications Of OpenID (Google Tech Talk) Presentation Transcript