Privacy – Page 9 – Kim Cameron's Identity Weblog

Chaos computer club gives us the German phish finger

If you missed this article in The Register, you missed the most instructive story to date about applied biometrics:

A hacker club has published what it says is the fingerprint of Wolfgang Schauble, Germany's interior minister and a staunch supporter of the collection of citizens’ unique physical characteristics as a means of preventing terrorism.

In the most recent issue of Die Datenschleuder, the Chaos Computer Club printed the image on a plastic foil that leaves fingerprints when it is pressed against biometric readers…

“The whole research has always been inspired by showing how insecure biometrics are, especially a biometric that you leave all over the place,” said Karsten Nohl, a colleague of an amateur researcher going by the moniker Starbug, who engineered the hack. “It's basically like leaving the password to your computer everywhere you go without you being able to control it anymore.” …

A water glass

Schauble's fingerprint was captured off a water glass he used last summer while participating in a discussion celebrating the opening of a religious studies department at the University of Humboldt in Berlin. The print came from an index finger, most likely the right one, Starbug believes, because Schauble is right-handed.

The print is included in more than 4,000 copies of the latest issue of the magazine, which is published by the CCC. The image is printed two ways: one using traditional ink on paper, and the other on a film of flexible rubber that contains partially dried glue. The latter medium can be covertly affixed to a person's finger and used to leave an individual's prints on doors, telephones or biometric readers…

Schauble is a big proponent of using fingerprints and other unique characteristics to identify individuals.

“Each individual’s fingerprints are unique,” he is quoted as saying in this official interior department press release announcing a new electronic passport that stores individuals’ fingerprints on an RFID chip. “This technology will help us keep one step ahead of criminals. With the new passport, it is possible to conduct biometric checks, which will also prevent authentic passports from being misused by unauthorized persons who happen to look like the person in the passport photo.”

The magazine is calling on readers to collect the prints of other German officials, including Chancellor Angela Merkel, Bavarian Prime Minister Guenther Beckstein and BKA President Joerg Ziercke.

“The thing I like a lot is the political activism of the hack,” said Bruce Schneier, who is chief security technology officer for BT and an expert on online authentication. Fingerprint readers were long ago shown to be faulty, largely because designers opt to make the devices err on the side of false positives rather than on the side of false negatives…

[Read the full article here]

Is New Zealand's government a ‘justifiable party’?

Vikram Kumar works for New Zealand's State Services Commission on the All-of-government Authentication Programme. As he puts it, “… that means my working and blog lives intersect….” In this discussion of the Third Law of Identity, he argues that in New Zealand, where the population of the whole country is smaller than that of many international cities, people may consider the government to be a “justifiable party” in private sector transactions:

A recent article in CR80News called Social networking sites have little to no identity verification got me thinking about the Laws of Identity, specifically Justifiable Parties, “Digital identity systems must be designed so the disclosure of identifying information is limited to parties having a necessary and justifiable place in a given identity relationship.”

The article itself makes points that have been made before, i.e. on social networking sites “there’s no way to tell whether you’re corresponding with a 15-year-old girl or a 32-year-old man…The vast majority of sites don’t do anything to try to confirm the identities of members. The sites also don’t want to absorb the cost of trying to prove the identity of their members. Also, identifying minors is almost impossible because there isn’t enough information out there to authenticate their identity.”

In the US, this has thrown up business opportunities for some companies to act as third party identity verifiers. Examples are Texas-based Entrust, Dallas-based RelyID, and Atlanta-based IDology. They rely on public and financial records databases and, in some cases, government-issued identification as a fallback.

Clearly, these vendors are Justifiable Parties.

What about the government? It is the source of most of the original information. Is the government a Justifiable Party?

In describing the law, Kim Cameron says “Today some governments are thinking of operating digital identity services. It makes sense (and is clearly justifiable) for people to use government-issued identities when doing business with the government. But it will be a cultural matter as to whether, for example, citizens agree it is “necessary and justifiable” for government identities to be used in controlling access to a family wiki or connecting a consumer to her hobby or vice.” [emphasis added]

So, in the US, where there isn’t a high trust relationship between people and the government, the US government would probably not be a Justifiable Party. In other words, if the US government was to try and provide social networking sites with the identity of its members, the law of Justifiable Parties predicts that it would fail.

This is probably no great discovery- most Americans would have said the conclusion is obvious, law of Justifiable Parties or not.

Which then leads to the question of other cultures…are there cultures where government could be a Justifiable Party for social networking sites?

To address, I think it is necessary to distinguish between the requirements of social networking sites that need real-world identity attributes (e.g. age) and the examples that Kim gives- family wiki, connecting a consumer to her hobby or vice- where authentication is required (i.e. it is the same person each time without a reliance on real-world attributes).

Now, I think government does have a role to play in verifying real-world identity attributes like age. It is after all the authoritative source of that information. If a person makes an age claim and government accepts it, government-issued documents reflects the accepted claim as, what I call, an authoritative assertion that other parties accept.

The question then is whether in some high trust societies, where there is a sufficiently high trust relationship between society and government, can the government be a Justifiable Party in verifying the identity (or identity attributes such as age alone) for the members of social networking societies?

I believe that the answer is yes. Specifically, in New Zealand where this trust relationship exists, I believe it is right and proper for government to play this role. It is of course subject to many caveats, such as devising a privacy-protective system for the verification of identity or identity attributes and understanding the power of choice.

In NZ, igovt provides this. During public consultation held late last year about igovt, people were asked whether they would like to use the service to verify their identity to the private sector (in addition to government agencies). In other words, is government a Justifiable Party?

The results from the public consultation are due soon and will provide the answer. Based on the media coverage of igovt so far, I think the answer, for NZ, will be yes, government is a Justifiable Party.

It is noteworthy that if citizens give them the go-ahead, the State Services Commission is prepared to take on the responsibility and risk of managing all aspects of the digital identity of New Zealand's citizens . The combined governement and commercial identities the Commission administers will attract attackers. Effectively, the Commission will be handling “digital explosives” of a greater potency than has so far been the case anywhere in the world.

At the same time, the other Laws of Identity will continue to hold. The Commission will need to work extra hard to achieve data minimization after having collapsed previously independent contexts together. I think this can be done, but it requires tremendous care and use of the most advanced policies and technologies.

To be safe, such an intertwined system must, more than any other, minimize disclosure and aggregation of information. And more than any other, it must be resilient against attack.

If I lived in New Zealand I would be working to see that the Commission's system is based on a minimal disclosure technology like U-Prove or Idemix. I would also be working to make sure the system avoids “redirection protocols” that give the identity provider complete visibility into how identity is used. (Redirection protocols unsuitable for this usage include SAML and WS-Federation, as well as OpenID). Finally, I would make phishing resistance a top priority. In short, I wouldn't touch this kind of challenge without Information Cards and very distributed, encrypted information storage.

How to safely deliver information to auditors

I just came across Ian Brown's proposal for doing random audits while avoiding data breaches like Britain's terrible HMRC Identity Chernobyl:

It is clear from correspondence between the National Audit Office and Her Majesty's Revenue & Customs over the lost files fiasco that this data should never have been requested, nor supplied.

NAO wanted to choose a random sample of child benefit recipients to audit. Understandably, it did not want HMRC to select that sample “randomly”. However, HMRC could have used an extremely simple bit-commitment protocol to give NAO a way to choose recipients themselves without revealing any of the data related to those not chosen:

For each recipient, HMRC should have calculated a cryptographic hash of all of the recipient's data and then given NAO a set of index numbers and this hash data.

NAO could then select a sample of these records to audit. They would inform HMRC of the index values of the records in that sample.

HMRC would finally supply only those records. NAO could verify the records had not been changed by comparing their hashes to those in the original data received from HMRC.

This is not cryptographic rocket science. Any competent computer science graduate could have designed this scheme and implemented it in about an hour using an open source cryptographic library like OpenSSL.

Ben Laurie notes that the redacted correspondence itself demonstrates a lack of basic security awareness. I hope those carrying out the security review of the ContactPoint database are better informed.

Microsoft says, “U-Prove it”

Ralf Bendrath chided me yesterday for bragging about having proven Bruce Schneier wrong in his concern that there is not a “viable business model” for the Credentica technology. (In my defense, Bruce had said, “I'd like to be proven wrong.”, and I was just trying to oblige him.)

Anyway, I think Joe Wilcox's article in eWeek's Microsoft Watch provides some unbiased analysis of the issue.

Sometimes, Microsoft really spends its money well, such as last week's acquisition of U-Prove technology from Credentica.

This is a damn, exciting acquisition. It's strategic and timely.

U-Prove is, simply put, a privacy/security protection mechanism. The technology works on a simple principle: Enable transactions by revealing as little information as possible.

Credentica's Stefan Brands, Christian Paquin and Greg Thompson have joined Microsoft, where they will work as part of the Identity and Access Group. Microsoft also acquired associated U-Prove patents.

Brands is a well-regarded cryptographer and author of “Rethinking Public Key Infrastructures and Digital Certificates; Building in Privacy,” which explains the principles behind U-Prove. The book is available for free download, courtesy of MIT Press. He brings a somewhat radical approach to cryptography: Disclose or collect little—ideally no—private information during any transaction process. During most transactions, whether online or offline, too much personal information is exposed.

I vaguely recall Brands from Zero-Knowledge Systems, where he went in early 2000. About six months earlier I consulted Zero-Knowledge Systems’ chief scientist for a story about an alleged cryptographic flaw/back door in then unreleased Windows 2000.

Brands, his colleagues and U-Prove will first go into Windows Cardspace and Windows Communications Foundation. Microsoft's Brendon Lynch explained in a Thursday blog post:

“Credentica's U-Prove technology will help people protect their identities by enabling them to disclose only the minimum amount of information needed for a transaction—sometimes no personal information may be needed at all. When this technology is broadly available in Microsoft products (such as Windows Communication Foundation and Windows Cardspace), enterprises, governments and consumers all stand to benefit from the enhanced security and privacy that it will enable. We look forward to a world where people have more control of their personal information and are better protected from harms of online fraud and identity theft.”

Kim Cameron, Microsoft's identity architect, does a wonderful job explaining Brands’ “minimal disclosure” approach in a Thursday blog post and how the company may apply it. The basic concept: to use other cryptographic means to verify identity “without revealing the signature applied by the identity provider.”

Microsoft has made one helluva good acquisition, whose potential long-term benefits I simply cannot overstate. The company has been trying to tackle the identity problem for nearly a decade. Early days, Passport acted as a single sign-on for multiple services, a heritage Windows Live ID expanded. But U-Prove departs from Microsoft's past identity efforts. The idea is to identify you without, well, identifying you.

Microsoft online services would look dramatically different with an identity mechanism that truly protected privacy and security on both sides of the transaction all while guaranteeing both parties that they are who they say they are, without necessarily saying who they are.

The best conceptual analogy I can think of is Swiss or offshore banking, where an account holder presents a numerical token or tokens that verify his or her right to account access but not the individual's identity or necessarily the token's issuer. Such a mechanism could be a boon to business and consumer confidence in online transactions as well as reduce petty fraud.

Microsoft's money would be better spent on more acquisitions like this one, rather than frittering away valuable resources on Yahoo. Microsoft is operating on the false premise that Google's huge search lead also puts it ahead in advertising—too far to catch up without a means of leaping ahead. Yahoo is the means.

But Microsoft is mistaken. Online activities and transactions are more complex than that. Search is one strategic technology, but there are others that Google doesn't control. If Microsoft could take a strategic lead protecting identity around transactions, the company could better enable all kinds of Web activities, and in so doing raise its online credibility. Privacy concerns have dogged Google.

I think Microsoft should take half of its proposed Yahoo offer and spend it on more acquisitions like Credentica's U-Prove technology. I'm not the first to suggest that Microsoft spend $20 billion on smaller companies. But I will say that U-Prove is an example what Microsoft should do to bolster its online technology portfolio in more meaningful ways, without taking on the hardship of a large, messy acquisition like Yahoo.

Ralf Bendrath on the Credentica acquisition

Privacy, security and Internet researcher and activist Ralf Bendrath is a person who thinks about privacy deeply. The industry has a lot to learn from him about modelling and countering privacy threats. Here is his view of the recent credentica acquisition:

Microsoft has acquired Montreal-based privacy technology company Credentica. While that probably means nothing to most of you out there, it is one of the most important and promising developments in the digital identity world.

My main criticism around user-centric identity management has been that the identity provider (the party that you and others rely on, like your credit card issuer or the agency that gave you your driver's license) knows a lot about the users. Microsoft's identity architect Kim Cameron explains it very well:

[W]ith managed cards carrying claims asserted by a third party authority, it has so far been impossible, even for CardSpace, to completely avoid artifacts that allow linkage. (…) Though relying parties are not able to collude with one another, if they collude with the identity provider, a set of claims can be linked to a given user even if they contain no obvious linking information.

This is related to the digital signatures involved in the claims flows. Kim goes on:

But there is good news. Minimal disclosure technology allows the identity provider to sign the token and proof key in such a way that the user can prove the claims come legitimately from the identity provider without revealing the signature applied by the identity provider.

Stefan Brands was among the first to invent technology for minimal disclosure or “zero knowledge” proofs in the early nineties, similar to what David Chaum did with his anonymous digital cash concept. His technology was bought by the privacy firm Zero-Knowledge until they ran out of funding and gave it back to Stefan. He has since then built his own company, Credentica, and, together with his colleagues Christian Paquin and Greg Thompson, developed it into a comprehensive middleware product called “U-Prove” that was released a bit more than a year ago. U-Prove works with SAML, Liberty ID-WSF, and Windows CardSpace.

The importance of the concept of “zero-knowledge proofs” for privacy is comparable to the impact public key infrastructures (PKIs) described by Witfield Diffie and Martin Hellmann had on internet security. The U-Prove technology based on these concepts has been compared to what Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir and Leonard Adleman (RSA) did for security when they were the first to offer an algorithm and a product based on PKIs.

When I was at the CFP conference in Montreal last May, I was meeting Kim and Stefan, and a colleague pointed me to the fact that Kim was being very nice to Stefan. “He has some cool patents Microsoft really wants”, my colleague said. Bruce Schneier recently also praised U-Prove, but questioned the business model for companies like Credentica. He added, “I’d like to be proven wrong.”

Kim Cameron is now bragging about having proven Bruce wrong (which is hard to imagine, given the fact that “Bruce Schneier feeds Schrödinger's cat on his back porch. Without opening the box”), while admitting that he still has no business model:

Our goal is that Minimal Disclosure Tokens will become base features of identity platforms and products, leading to the safest possible intenet. I don’t think the point here is ultimately to make a dollar. It’s about building a system of identity that can withstand the ravages that the Internet will unleash. That will be worth billions.

Stefan Brands is also really happy:

For starters, the market needs in identity and access management have evolved to a point where technologies for multi-party security and privacy can address real pains. Secondly, there is no industry player around that I believe in as much as Microsoft with regard to its commitment to build security and privacy into IT systems and applications. Add to that Microsoft’s strong presence in many of the target markets for identity and access management, its brain trust, and the fact that Microsoft can influence both the client and server side of applications like no industry player can, and it is easy to see why this is a perfect match.

A good overview of other reactions is at Kim's latest blog post. The cruicial issue has, again, been pointed out by Ben Laurie, who quotes the Microsoft Privacy Team's blog:

When this technology is broadly available in Microsoft products (such as Windows Communication Foundation and Windows Cardspace), enterprises, governments, and consumers all stand to benefit from the enhanced security and privacy that it will enable.

Ben sarcastically reads it like “the Microsoft we all know and love”, implying market domination based on proprietary technology. But the Microsoft we all know in the identity field is not the one we used to know with Passport and other crazy proprietary surveillance stuff. They have released the standards underlying the CardSpace claims exchange under an open specification promise, and Kim assures us that they will have their lawyers sort out the legal issues so anybody can use the technology:

I can guarantee everyone that I have zero intention of hoarding Minimal Disclosure Tokens or turning U-Prove into a proprietary Microsoft technology silo. Like, it’s 2008, right? Give me a break, guys!

Well. Given the fact that U-Prove is not just about claims flows, but involves fancy advanced cryptography, they really should do everybody a favour and release the source code and some libraries that contain the algorithm under a free license, and donate the patent to the public domain.

First of all, because yes – it's 2008, and “free is the new paid”, as even the IHT has discovered in January 2007.

Second, because yes – it's 2008, and there has been an alternative product out there under a free license for more than a year. IBM Research Labs Zurich have finished their Idemix identity software that works with zero-knowledge proofs in January 2007. It is part of the Higgins identity suite and will be available under an open source license. (The Eclipse lawyers seem to have been looking into this for more than a year, though. Does anybody know about the current status?)

Third, because yes – it's 2008, it's not 1882 anymore, to quote Bruce Schneier again:

A basic rule of cryptography is to use published, public, algorithms and protocols. This principle was first stated in 1883 by Auguste Kerckhoffs.

While I don't follow Ralf into every nook and cranny of his argument, I think he has a pretty balanced view.

But Ralf, you should tell your friend I was being very nice to Stefan in Montreal because I find him very amusing, especially with a scotch in him. I would have tried to get his technology into widescale use whether I liked him or not, and I would have liked him just as much if he didn't have any patents at all.

I don't want to get into a “free is the new paid” discussion. As the article you cite states, “Mass media given away freely or at low cost is hardly new, of course. In many countries, over-the-air television and radio have long been financed primarily by advertisers, at no direct cost to consumers.” So what is new here? When I can apply this paradigm to my next dinner, tell me about it.

This having been vented, I come to exactly the same general conclusions you do: we want a safe, privacy-friendly identity infrastructure as the basis for a safe, privacy-friendly Internet, and we should do everything possible to make it easier for everyone to bring that about. So your suggestions go in the right direction. If we were ultimately to give the existing code to a foundation, I would like to know what foundation people in the privacy community would suggest.

As for the business model issue, I agree with you and Bruce – and Stefan – that there is no obvious business model for a small company. But for companies like Microsoft, our long term success depends on the flourishing of the Internet and the digital economy. The best and most trustworthy possible identity infrastructure is key to that. So for the Microsofts, the IBMs, the Suns and others, this technology fits very squarely into our business models.

As for the Identity and Access group at Microsoft, our goal is to have the most secure, privacy-friendly, interoperable, complete, easy to use and manageable identity products available. As the Internet's privacy and identity problems become clearer to people, this strategy will attract many new customers and keep the loyalty of existing ones. So there you have it. To us, U-Prove technology is foundational to building a very significant business.

Reactions to Credentica acquisition

Network World's John Fontana has done a great job of explaining what it means for Microsoft to integrate U-Prove into its offerings:

Microsoft plans to incorporate U-Prove into both Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and CardSpace, the user-centric identity software in Vista and XP.

Microsoft said all its servers and partner products that incorporate the WCF framework would provide support for U-Prove.

“The main point is that this will just become part of the base identity infrastructure we offer. Good privacy practices will become one of the norms of e-commerce,” Cameron said.

“The U-Prove technology looks like a good candidate as an authentication mechanism for CardSpace-managed cards (i.e., those cards issued by an identity provider),” Mark Diodati, an analyst with the Burton Group, wrote on his blog.

In general, the technology ensures that users always have say over what information they release and that the data can not be linked together by the recipients. That means that recipients along the chain of disclosure can not aggregate the data they collect and piece together the user’s personal information.

[More here…]

Eric Norlin has this piece in CSO, and Nancy Gohring's ComputerWorld article emphasizes that “U-Prove is the equivalent in the privacy world of RSA in the security space.” Burton's Mark Diodati covers the acquisition here.

Gunnar Peterson from 1 Raindrop notes in That Was Fast:

…the digital natives may be getting some better tooling faster than I thought. I am sure you already know there is a northern alliance and Redmond is U-Prove enabled. I fondly remember a lengthy conversation I had with Stefan Brands in Croatia several years ago, while he patiently explained to me how misguided the security-privacy collision course way of thinking is, and instead how real security is only achieved with privacy. If you have not already, I recommend you read Stefans’ primer on user identification.

Entrepreneur and angel investor Austin Hill gives us some background and links here:

In the year 2000, Zero-Knowledge acquired the rights to Dr. Stefan Brands work and hired Stefan to help us build privacy-enhanced identity & payments systems. It turns out we were very early into the identity game, failed to commercialize the technology – and during the Dot.Com bust cycle we shut down the business unit and released the patents back to Stefan. This was groundbreaking stuff that Stefan had invented, and we invested heavily in trying to make it real, but there weren’t enough bitters in the market at that time. We referred to the technologies as the “RSA” algorithms of the identity & privacy industry. Unfortunately the ‘privacy & identity’ industry didn’t exist.

Stefan went on to found Crendentica to continue the work of commercialization of his invention. Today he announced that Microsoft has acquired his company and he and his team are joining Microsoft.

Microsoft’s Identity Architect Guru Kim Cameron has more on the deal on his blog (he mentions the RSA for privacy concept as well).

Adam Shostack (former Zero Knowledge Evil Genius, who also created a startup & currently works at Microsoft) has this post up. George Favvas, CEO of SmartHippo (also another Zero-Knowledge/Total.Net alumni – entrepreneur) also blogged about the deal as well.

Congratulations to Stefan and the team. This is a great deal for Microsoft, the identity industry and his team. (I know we tried to get Microsoft to buy or adopt the technology back in 2001 🙂

(I didn't really know much about Zero-Knowledge back in 2000, but it's interesting to see how early they characterized of Stefan's technology as being the privacy equivalent of RSA. It's wonderful to see people who are so forward-thinking.)

Analyst Neil Macehiter writes:

Credentica was founded by acknowledged security expert Stefan Brands, whose team has applied some very advanced cryptography techniques to allow users to authenticate to service providers directly without the involvement of identity providers. They also limit the disclosure of personally-identifiable information to prevent accounts being linked across service providers and provide resistance to phishing attacks. Credentica's own marketing literature highlights the synergies with CardSpace:

“`The SDK is ideally suited for creating the electronic equivalent of the cards in one's wallet and for protecting identity-related information in frameworks such as SAML, Liberty ID-WSF, and Windows CardSpace.”

This is a smart move by Microsoft. Not only does it bring some very innovative and well-respected technology (with endorsements from the likes of the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario, Canada) which extends the capabilities of Microsoft's identity and security offerings; it also brings some heavyweight cryptography and privacy expertise and credibility from the Credentica team. The latter can, and undoubtedly will, be exploited by Microsoft in the short term: the former will take more time to realise with Microsoft stating that integrated offerings are at least 12–18 months away.

[More here…]

Besides the many positives, there were concerns expressed about whether Microsoft would make the technology available beyond Windows. Ben Laurie wrote:

Kim and Stefan blog about Microsoft’s acquisition of Stefan’s selective disclosure patents and technologies, which I’ve blogged about many times before.

This is potentially great news, especially if one interprets Kim’s

Our goal is that Minimal Disclosure Tokens will become base features of identity platforms and products, leading to the safest possible intenet. I don’t think the point here is ultimately to make a dollar. It’s about building a system of identity that can withstand the ravages that the Internet will unleash.

in the most positive way. Unfortunately, comments such as this from Stefan

Microsoft plans to integrate the technology into Windows Communication Foundation and Windows Cardspace.

and this from Microsoft’s Privacy folk

When this technology is broadly available in Microsoft products (such as Windows Communication Foundation and Windows Cardspace), enterprises, governments, and consumers all stand to benefit from the enhanced security and privacy that it will enable.

sound more like the Microsoft we know and love.

I hope everyone who reads this blog knows that it is elementary, my dear Laurie, that identity technology must work across boundaries, platforms and vendors (Law 5 – not to mention, “Since the identity system has to work on all platforms, it must be safe on all platforms”).

That doesn't mean it is trivial to figure out the best legal mecahnisms for making the intellectual property and even the code available to the ecosystem. Lawyers are needed, and it takes a while. But I can guarantee everyone that I have zero intention of hoarding Minimal Disclosure Tokens or turning U-Prove into a proprietary Microsoft technology silo.

Like, it's 2008, right? Give me a break, guys!

Know your need

Here's a great comment from the smart and witty Paul Madsen. He really his the nail on the head with his “Know your Need” corollory

In announcing Microsoft's purchase of the Credentica patents (and hiring of Stefan's core team), Kim uses the ‘need to know’ analogy.

That danger can be addressed by adopting a need-to-know approach to the Internet.

(For the life of me, I just cannot get Sgt Shultz's ‘I know nothing’ out of my head.)

Credentica's U-prove technology promises to close off a (depending on the deployment environment, potentially big) ‘knowledge leak’ – if the IDP doesn't need to know what/where/why/when/who the user does with the assertions it creates, then the principle of minimal ‘need to know’ means that it shouldn't.

Cardspace seems a great application for U-Prove to prove itself. As Stefan points out, ‘its a good thing’ to influence/control both client and server.

Separately, I see the flip side of ‘need to know’ as ‘know your need’, i.e. entities involved in identity transactions must be able to assess and assert their needs for identity attributes. This is the CARML piece of the Identity Governance Framework). Put another way, before a decision is made as to whether or not some entity ‘needs to know’, it'd be nice to know why they are asking.

I agree that it is sometimes a positive and useful thing for a claims provider to know the user's “what, where, why, when and who”. So everything is a matter of minimization – but within to the requirements of the scenario.

I don't actually buy the “influence/control both client and server” phraseology. I'm fine with influence, but see control as an elusive and worthless goal. That's not how the world works. It works through synergy and energy radiating from everywhere, and those of us who are on this odyssey must tap into that.

Microsoft to adopt Stefan Brands’ Technology

The Internet may sometimes randomly “forget”. But in general it doesn't.

Once digital information is released to a few parties, it really is “out there”. Cory Doctorow wrote recently about what he called the half-life of personal information, pointing out that personal information doesn't just “dissipate” after use. It hangs around like radioactive waste. You can't just push a button and get rid of it.

I personally think we are just beginning to understand what it would mean if everything we do is both remembered and automatically related to everything else we do. No evil “Dr. No” is necessary to bring this about, although evil actors might accelerate and take advantage of the outcome. Linkage is just a natural tendency of digital reality, similar to entropy in the physical world. When designing phsyical systems a big part of our job is countering entropy. And in the digital sphere, our designs need to counter linkage.

This has led me to the idea of the “Need-to-Know Internet”.

The Need-to-Know Internet

“Need to Know” thinking comes from the military. The precept is that if people in dangerous situations don't know things they don't need to know, that information can't leak or be used in ways that increase danger. Taken as a starting point, it leads to a safer environment.

As Craig Burton pointed out many years ago, one key defining aspect of the Internet is that everything is equidistant from everything else.

That means we can get easily to the most obscure possible resources, which makes the Internet fantastic. But it also means unknown “enemies” are as “close” to us as our “friends” – just a packet away. If something is just a packet away, you can't see it coming, or prepare for it. This aspect of digital “physics” is one of the main reasons the Internet can be a dangerous place.

That danger can be addressed by adopting a need-to-know approach to the Internet. As little personal information as possible should be released, and to the smallest possible number of parties. Architecturally, our infrastructure should lead naturally to this outcome. Continue reading Microsoft to adopt Stefan Brands’ Technology

From The Economist: the Identity Parade

It's great to see mainstream publications really taking the time to understand and convey the issues of digital identity and privacy. A recent article in the Economist discussed the Laws of Identity at length. Cambridge researcher Ross Anderson and others are quoted as well. Here's an excerpt that gives you a sense for the full article:

Internet users have become used to providing personal information to any convincing-looking box that appears on a screen. They have little idea of either the technology that helps to provide electronic security in practice or the theoretical principles that determine whether it will work. According to Mr Cameron, “there is no consistent and comprehensible framework allowing them to evaluate the authenticity of the sites they visit, and they don't have a reliable way of knowing when they are disclosing private information to illegitimate parties. At the same time they lack a framework for controlling or even remembering the many different aspects of their digital existence”…

Cybercrime discredits the use of the internet not only by business but by government too. Mr Cameron suggests rethinking the whole issue, starting from the principle that users may be identified only with their explicit consent. That sounds commonsensical, but many big government databases do things differently. Britain's planned central records for the NHS, for example, will assume consent as it combines all the medical records held in local practice databases.

The second principle, says Mr Cameron, should be to keep down the risk of a breach by using as little information as possible to achieve the task in hand. This approach, which he calls “information minimalism”, rules out keeping information “just in case”. For example, if a government agency needs to check if someone falls into a certain age group, it is far better to acquire and store this information temporarily as a “yes” or “no” than to record the actual date of birth permanently, which would be much more personal and therefore more damaging if leaked.

Third, identity systems must be able to check who is asking for the information, not just hand it over. How easy it is for the outside world to access such information should depend on whose identity it is. Public bodies, Mr Cameron suggests, should make themselves accessible to all comers. Private individuals, by contrast, should be protected so that they have to identify themselves only temporarily and by choice…

[More here…]

Handbags at dawn?

Here is Pat Patterson's post on my recent discussion with Ben Laurie. Pat is a widely respected member of Sun's identity team, blogs at Superpatterns, and runs the useful PlanetIdentity RSS feed. There are a number of ways you could build a Password Manager for CardSpace, but I thought readers would enjoy seeing Pat's take on it:

You might have noticed the exchange between Ben and Kim over the past day or two… Ben made a point that CardSpace makes OpenID redundant – why not just send a password to the RP? Kim jumped all over him – somewhat misinterpreting what Ben later describes as one of my most diabolical hungover bits of prose ever. Ben goes on to clarify that maybe CardSpace can have a role in helping the user manage passwords; Kim says “Hmm… Food for thought” (okay, I'm paraphrasing); Ben admits he didn't explain himself too clearly to begin with; and, glory be, they're violently agreeing. Phew! I thought we were going to be seeing handbags at dawn…

Reading all this lit a spark in my mind of how this could work. The crux is to consider the username/password token, usually sent as one of a set of possible input tokens to an identity provider security token service (IP/STS), as an output token.

Here's how it would work… Borrowing a diagram from Microsoft's Guide to Interoperating with the Information Card Profile V1.0:

First of all, the IP/STS would specify ic:RequireAppliesTo in the managed card. This tells the identity selector to include a wsp:AppliesTo element in the wst:RequestSecurityToken (RST). The IP/STS is going to need this later…

Now, the user visits the relying party (RP) in step 1, requesting some resource. In step 2, the ‘service requestor’ (application client with identity selector) requests security policy from the RP. The RP would indicate, in step 3, that it wanted a username/password token by specifying a token type of http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-username-token-profile-1.0 in the policy.

Now the identity selector presents some set of information cards (hopefully just one) to the user (step 5) and the user selects one (step 6). Steps 7 and 8 would see the RP requesting security policy from the IP/STS, and the IP/STS supplying it, exactly as in the standard information card interaction. Here the IP/STS could require any form of input token, but username/password is most likely.

Between steps 8 and 9, the identity selector prompts the user for credentials (bad Microsoft, missing that out of the diagram!) and in step 8, the identity selector packages up the user's credentials in a WS-Trust RST and send them to the IP/STS.

Now, here's the interesting bit. The IP/STS authenticates the user, exactly as in the standard CardSpace case, but now it looks at the wsp:AppliesTo element, and looks up the user's username/password pair for that RP (this is an implementation detail – there could be a mapping of RP identifiers to username/password pairs per user, all encrypted on disk, of course). The IP/STS packages them as a wsse:UsernameToken, which is then encrypted with the RP's public key and returned to the identity selector (step 10). The display token could just show ******** for the value of the password claim. Now we have a nice, securely packaged credential that the identity selector can send to the RP in step 11.

Here's the other nice bit… All the RP has to do is to decrypt the incoming token and it has the user's username and password, exactly as if they had arrived by a conventional form post. No further customization required at the RP – no changes to directory or database schemas, no extra steps of associating an information card with your account. Passwords on steroids.

If the RP uses https, I'm not even sure there is any need to decrypt at the token layer, which simplifies implementation to decoding a simple xml structure. RP's who are looking for greated levels of security should switch to public key.

I'd like to hear Pat's ideas about the user experience of bootstrapping the passwords into the Identity Provider.