Wrong-headed impersonation

James Kobielus's blog also includes a report on his interview with Eve Mahler.  I think there are two issues raised that deserve discussion.  The first concerns what Eve calls the “human absent” scenario:

“She focused on the centricity of the user in the data flow during a login attempt, distinguishing between the “human present” interaction mode (i.e., the actual human user/subject is online during the transaction, responding to prompts, selecting i-cards, deciding whether or not to disclose this or that personal attribute to this or that relying party), vs. the “human absent” interaction (i.e., the human user/subject is not actually online during the transaction on which they are a principal, but, instead, an identity software agent/intermediary or delegated other human user is selecting i-cards, disclosing attributes etc. on their behalf).

“She pointed out that most of the current crop of user-centric identity schemes (i.e, MSFT CardSpace, OpenID, etc.) focus primarily on the “human present” mode, which, as Eve stated memorably, means that the “user's policy is in their brain.” By contrast, she pointed out, Liberty's ID-WSF was developed to support both the “human present” and “human absent” modes.

The essence here is her notion that “an identity software agent/intermediary or delegated other human user is selecting i-cards, disclosing attributes etc. on [the user's] behalf”.

On behalf of…

I'm going to make a categorical statement.  No one and no service should ever act in a peron's identity or employ their credentials when they're not present.  Ever.

It's not that there aren't use cases for which this might seem to be desireable.  For example, let's look at the problem of linkback spam, in which fake sites fill bloggers’ comment queues with garbage.  Suppose, one day, we come up with authenticated linkbacks.  Wouldn't you want the linkback service to be able to log in with your identity?

Another example – given to me by someone who thought it was really definitive – was that of the OnStar notification system.  Suppose you're driving, are involved in an accident, and lose consciousness.  You want your OnStar system to call on your behalf so help will be dispatched.  Clearly you can't participate.  Similarly, hospital scenarios provide all kind of grist for the “human absent” mill.  But should OnStar or a hospital system actually be acting “as you”?

Last-century systems supported exactly this kind of behavior.  We called it “impersonation”.  And anyone who has done practical security work will tell you how many problems this caused, and how wrong-headed it is.  If you give some service the ability to simply appear to be you, you are open to all kinds of attacks – and we've seen them all around us.

Put another way, I don't want OnStar to be be able to act on my behalf with respect to very many things.  I don't want it to be able to remove money from my bank account.  I don't want it buying gifts, or controlling my insurance, or doing anything else other than calling for help.

So what I really want is for OnStar to identify itself as Onstar, and for Kim to identify himself as Kim.  Then Kim can give OnStar a Delegation Coupon allowing it to call for help on my behalf.  The coupon should be very restrictive.  And if the service does something improper, that impropriety will clearly be associated with the service's own identity, not with Kim.

There is no user-absent scenario 

In otherwords, there is no user-absent scenario.  There is a user is present and delegates authority scenario.  After all, how can a user delegate authority if she isn't present???

CardSpace is built on this principle.  A delegated authority coupon is just a set of claims.  CardSpace facilitates the exchange of any claims you want – including delegation claims.  So using CardSpace, someone can build a system allowing users to delegate authority to a service which can then operate – as itself – presenting delegation tokens whenever appropriate.

This is the right way to do things from a security point of view.  We need to move beyond the idea of omnipotent services running behind the curtain, which is what we have come up with in the past, to a truly secure model where the user consciously delegates and systems demonstrate this in an auditable fashion.

Surely it is obvious this is the best way to reduce everyone's exposure and liability.  The user has less exposure because she controls what she delegates.  The service has less exposure because it operates under specific and explicit permissioning, and insider attacks are significantly mitigated.

As much as I think Liberty represented a step forward when it first stepped up to the plate, it needs to embrace the user-centric model and replace the more monolithic “on behalf of” mechanisms with a proper approach to delegation under the control of the affected parties.

 

WordPress 2.1.1 dangerous, Upgrade to 2.1.2

Any product that is really successful is going to be attacked.  Over time the attacks will become progressively more sophisticated.  Given how popular – and how good – WordPress is, it doesn't surprise me that it has attracted enough attention that someone eventually broke through. 

Guess what?  I'm running 2.1.1 in my test environment.  Good thing I haven't flicked the switch.  Anyway, here's the scoop as explained by WordPress:

Long story short: If you downloaded WordPress 2.1.1 within the past 3-4 days, your files may include a security exploit that was added by a cracker, and you should upgrade all of your files to 2.1.2 immediately.

Longer explanation: This morning we received a note to our security mailing address about unusual and highly exploitable code in WordPress. The issue was investigated, and it appeared that the 2.1.1 download had been modified from its original code. We took the website down immediately to investigate what happened.

It was determined that a cracker had gained user-level access to one of the servers that powers wordpress.org, and had used that access to modify the download file. We have locked down that server for further forensics, but at this time it appears that the 2.1.1 download was the only thing touched by the attack. They modified two files in WP to include code that would allow for remote PHP execution.

This is the kind of thing you pray never happens, but it did and now we’re dealing with it as best we can. Although not all downloads of 2.1.1 were affected, we’re declaring the entire version dangerous and have released a new version 2.1.2 that includes minor updates and entirely verified files. We are also taking lots of measures to ensure something like this can’t happen again, not the least of which is minutely external verification of the download package so we’ll know immediately if something goes wrong for any reason.

Finally, we reset passwords for a number of users with SVN and other access, so you may need to reset your password on the forums before you can login again. (More here…)

Am I ever relieved that I'm using Project Pamela's InfoCard plugin in the new environment!  I haven't written about it yet, since I've been evaluating the beta.  But thanks to Project Pamela, I will just have to download 2.1.2, and change one line in one WordPress file to get InfoCard login working with it.  Let's drink a toast to proper factoring!  I'll be writing about this amazing plugin soon.

By the way, I have good news for the old-fashioned.  I'll be able to turn on username / password for comments again, since version 2.1.2 gets over the registration vulnerabilities in my current version. 

The whole episode brings up the interesting question of how to secure a widely distributed software project.  The more desirable you are as a target, the better the tools you need.  One day I hope to talk to the WordPress folks about incorporating InfoCards into their development process.

 

New book on Cybercrime

Speaking of new ways for a vendor to win my loyalty, here's an email I got today:

Dear Amazon.com Customer,

We've noticed that customers who have expressed interest in The Digital Person: Technology And Privacy In The Information Age by Daniel J. Solove have also ordered Cybercrime: Digital Cops in a Networked Environment (Ex Machina: Law, Technology, and Society) by J. M. Balkin. For this reason, you might like to know that J. M. Balkin's Cybercrime: Digital Cops in a Networked Environment (Ex Machina: Law, Technology, and Society) is now available. 

You can order your copy for just $22.00 by following the link below.

Cybercrime: Digital Cops in a Networked Environment (Ex Machina: Law, Technology, and Society)
  

J. M. Balkin

Price: $22.00

Book Description

  • “Cybercrime is written by the leading academic experts and government officials who team together to present a state-of-the-art vision for how to detect and prevent digital crime, creating the blueprint for how to police the dangerous back alleys of the global Internet.”

    — Peter P. Swire, C. William O'Neill Professor of Law, the Ohio State University, and former Chief Counselor for Privacy, U.S. Office of Management & Budget.)

  • “A timely and important collection of materials from highly qualified authors. Cybercrime will provide a wealth of new insights both for general readers and for those who study and teach about the legal and policy implications of the internet.”

    –David Johnson, Visiting … Read more)

I actually received this in my mail this morning.  I remember when I got my first email from Amazon, I started fuming.  My reaction was, “No!  This can't be! Not SPAM from Amazon!”.  It seemed incredible.

Then I read the message.  And guess what.  It wasn't SPAM.  Why?  By intersecting its knowledge of my interests with that of other people who share them, Amazon is able to make book suggestions that are just as cogent as most people I know.  This is what I call a relationship.  It isn't based on confinement or bombardment.  It's based on service.  The service is user-centric in a great way.

Now, moving down a level of abstraction, I think I'll buy the book.

Interesting summary by Kobielus

Despite the puns in his first paragraph, this piece by James Kobielus is very interesting, and sums up a lot of the conversations he has been having with people involved in the identity milieu:

“First off, I'd like to suggest that what we should be focusing on is not ‘user-centric identity’, per se, but ‘internet-scalable identity metasystems’ (a thought that Andre ping'd me on and Dick got me to take to hardt). What are the principles for making our identity metasystems truly internet-scalable? Could it be that user-centricity (however defined) is a necessary (but perhaps not sufficient) condition for internet-scalability?

“Now, let's look back to that previous post where I enumerated the main internet-scalability questions that Mr. Hardt laid out for our consideration:

  1. How do we scale up user-centric identity schemes, in which claims/attributes flow through and are forwarded by the user, so that they work on an open internet scale, not just within self-contained federations or circles of trust?
  2. How do we enable the free movement of claims from anywhere to anywhere?
  3. How do we extend lightweight identity management to the “long tail” of websites that don't and won't implement a heavyweight trust/federation model such as SAML or Liberty requires just to do chained/proxied authentication?
  4. How do we leverage the same core universal lightweight internet design patterns–i.e., REST using URIs and HTTP/HTTPS–to do internet-scale ubiquitous identity?

“Now I'm going to slightly shift the context for a moment to Kim Cameron's “laws of identity,” and then attempt to map that, plus Hardt's concerns, back to the notion of what it takes to make an identity metasystem truly internet-scalable. First, what I'll do is just republish Kim's actual written principles, but in a different order:

  • Consistent Experience Across Contexts: The unifying identity metasystem must guarantee its users a simple, consistent experience while enabling separation of contexts through multiple operators and technologies.
  • Pluralism of Operators and Technologies: A universal identity system must channel and enable the inter-working of multiple identity technologies run by multiple identity providers.
  • Human Integration: The universal identity metasystem must define the human user to be a component of the distributed system integrated through unambiguous human-machine communication mechanisms offering protection against identity attacks.
  • User Control and Consent: Technical identity systems must only reveal information identifying a user with the user’s consent.
  • Minimal Disclosure for a Constrained Use: The solution which discloses the least amount of identifying information and best limits its use is the most stable long term solution.
  • 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.
  • Directed Identity: A universal identity system must support both “omni-directional” identifiers for use by public entities and “unidirectional” identifiers for use by private entities, thus facilitating discovery while preventing unnecessary release of correlation handles.

“Now, I'll reclassify/regroup/rewrite these principles into three higher-order principles:

  • Abstraction: An internet-scalable identity metasystem must provide all end- and intermediary entities (i.e., users, identity agents, IdPs, RP/SPs, identity brokers, etc.) with a consistent, abstract, standardized , lightweight, reliable, speedy, and secure experience/interface across all use cases, interactions, credentials, protocols, platforms, etc while enabling separation of identity contexts across myriad domains, operators, and technologies.
  • Heterogeneity: An internet-scalable identity metasystem must enable seamless, standards-based interoperability across diverse identity use cases, interactions, design patterns, credentials, protocols, IdPs, RP/SPs, platforms, etc.
  • Mutuality: An internet-scalable identity metasystem must ensure that all end- and intermediary-entities (i.e., human users, identity agents, IdPs, RP/SPs, identity brokers, etc.) can engage in mutually acceptable interactions, with mutual risk balancing, and ensure that their various policies are continually enforced in all interactions, including, from the human user’s point of view, such key personal policies/peeves as the need for unambiguous human-machine communication mechanisms, privacy protection, user control and consent, minimal disclosure for a constrained use, limitation of disclosures to necessary and justifiable parties, and so on and so forth.

“Now, how would conformance to these three wordy uber-principles contribute to internet-scalability? Well, abstraction is the face of the universal interoperability backplane of any ubiquitous infrastructure (be it REST, SOA, ESB, or what have you). And heterogeneity is the fabric of any hyper-decentralized, federated, multidomain interoperability environment. And mutuality (i.e., a balancing of rights, responsibilities, risks, restrictions, rewards, etc.) is essential for any endpoint (e..g, the end user, an RP/SP, etc.) to participate in this heterogeneous, abstract environment with any degree of confidence that they can fend for themselves and actually benefit from plugging in.

“User-centric identity got going as an industry concern when it became clear that federated identity environments are not always mutual, from the end user's point of view. In other words, under “traditional” federation, some “attribute authority” (not necessarily under your or my direct control) may be coughing up major pieces (attributes) of our identity to unseen RP/SPs (also not under our control) without consulting us on the matter. In other words, those RP/SPs can selectively deny us access to the resources (i.e., apps, data, etc.) we seek, but we often can't selectively deny them access to the resources (i.e., our identity attributes) that they seek. Doesn't seem like a balanced equation, does it?

“Now, tying all this back to Dick's key design criteria for the identity metasystem (in summary): open, free, lightweight, ubiquitous interaction patterns. Seems to scream for abstraction plus heterogeneity plus mutuality, which are necessary and, taken together, sufficient conditions for internet scalability.

“In other words, necessary for the identity metasystem to be universally feasible, flexible, interoperable, implementable, extensible, and acceptable.

I think James makes good points. 

Certainly one of the main things that will get us to the identity big bang is correcting the way earlier systems  “disappeared” the user.  You can see this in the enterprise domain-based systems, where the domain was all-powerful, and it was just assumed that a user was an artifact of one single administrative domain. We now realize we need more flexible constructs.

And you can see it in consumer systems as well.

Why did we all do this?  It depends on the context.  In the consumer space, I think, for example, it was assumed that customers would be loyal to the convenience of a “circle of trust” set up by portal operators and their suppliers.  There was nothing innately wrong about this, but it is just one scenario seen from one point of view. 

From the individual customer's point of view, the “circles of trust” should really have been called “circles of profit” between which they were supposed to choose.  As Doc Searls says, this isn't the only customer relationship which is possible!  Basically, we're talking very last-century stuff that didn't understand the restructuring impact of the web – and these ideas now have to grow into a much wider context.  This is a world of really deep relationships with customers, not of forced confinement.

So a big “correction” was in the cards, and the popularity of the “user-centric” view derives partly from this.  But there are other forces at play, too.  People can talk about “user agents operating on our behalf” as much as they want.  But who decides what “our behalf” really is?  We need as individuals to control those agents – delegate to them as James says – and keep them from getting “too big for their britches…” 

So my basic thesis is not that there shouldn't be agents and services operating on our behalf – or that I would support an architecture that made this impossible.  It is that all these services and agents must begin and end by being under the user's control, and we need a consistent technology to achieve that.

I totally buy the notion that a web site gets to decide who accesses it, and what the rules of engagement are for that to happen (“trust is local”).  So the user's control with respect to her interests do not diminish a service's control with respect to its interests.  Should we call this mutuality?  I think what we really have is a mutual veto – both the user and the site being visited can set whatever bar they want before they back out of the transaction.  To me, in a world of competition, this remains control.

 

Mixed signals?

Stephen Mcgibbon, senior director of Microsoft's European technology office, is in the midst of a lively identity discussion on the Danish blog Overskudsdanmark.  In a posting called, “What CardSpace enables, Vista prevents…“, Stephen quotes Stephan Engberg – who is on the international advisory board of Privacy International and other important organizations – as saying,

“I can easily see that Cardspace in itself COULD be a step in the positive direction, but MS is sending mixed signals by pushing the aggressive Live Id and “trusted” computing simultaneously with Cardspace.

“That might be ok if someone else had access to make usable solutions, but it is not my understanding that VISTA and Cardspace provide that access. What Cardspace enables, VISTA prevents.”

I guess there are several issues here.  I'll defer the discussion of how CardSpace provides openness until Stephan has had a chance to look around this blog – the “HelloWorld Card” series would probably help get a technology orientation.  Or just poke through the articles, or look at comments like this recent one from Dale Olds at Novell.  While that's happening, I'll try to get more up to speed on his criticisms of Live ID and Vista.

Perhaps I can move the discussion forward by sharing some high level information about the current Windows Live ID service.

It's quite a bit different, conceptually, than Passport was – even though it is a technical evolution of that system.  At core, Live ID sees itself as part of a very distributed and multi-centered world, whereas Passport was centralized and technologically monolithic.

You can get a sense for this by looking at the most recent Windows Live ID Whitepaper.  Let me pass on a few quotes which I hope will entice you to read more of the paper:

How Does Windows Live ID Participate in the Identity Metasystem and Work with “InfoCard”?

Microsoft is working with others in the industry to create an identity metasystem that brings existing and future identity providers into a connected identity ecosystem and empowers end users to control the use of their identities. The Windows Live ID service will participate in the identity metasystem as one identity provider among many, able to accept claims from other identity providers and transform them so they can be used within Microsoft online services. This participation will include acceptance of self-issued and managed “InfoCards.” It will thus provide full support for the “InfoCard” identity model.

Roles of the Windows Live ID Service in the Identity Metasystem

Microsoft has published its vision of a universal identity solution that is inclusive of a plurality of identity operators and technologies—the identity metasystem. In such a metasystem, identity providers, relying parties, and subjects can select, request, transfer, transform, and consume identities through a suite of well-defined and open Web Services (WS-*) protocols. Microsoft is working to implement components of the identity metasystem, as are many other companies in the industry. As a result, various building blocks for the metasystem are being developed. Some of these components will be delivered to end users in the form of software installed and running locally on their computers and devices, while others will be online services.

The design philosophy of the identity metasystem is not to replace the existing identity systems in use today, but instead to bring these existing systems together by enabling interoperation among subjects, relying parties, and identity providers through industry standard protocols. The Windows Live ID service will participate in the identity metasystem as a “managed” identity provider already at Internet scale. Windows Live ID will bring a large base of end users and relying parties to the metasystem, taking us one step closer to Internet-wide identity federation and doing our part to help the industry move beyond the “walled garden” paradigm.

The Windows Live ID service will play several essential roles that are strategic for Microsoft. The service:

  • Is an Internet-scale identity provider intended primarily for users of Microsoft online services, which are all relying parties of the Windows Live ID service.
  • Is open and issues claims in a form that can be consumed by any relying party, any device, and any other trusted identity authority.
  • Serves Microsoft online services as a “claims transformer,” allowing those services to accept identities issued by third-parties. Third-party identity providers include other Internet service providers and managed-identity providers, such as the planned Active Directory Security Token Service (STS).
  • Will be the identity provider and federating authority for third party services and software built on top of the Microsoft online services platform

In short, I see Windows Live ID as the identity component for the MSN properties, which speaks standard protocols, and is trying to be open and do business with the other parties who want to engage.  This is all a new model – not only for Microsoft, but for the industry as a whole.  There are many business details to be worked out, as there are elsewhere in the industry.  But I see a progressively deeper committment to putting privacy first, and think my Live ID colleagues deserve a lot of credit for that.  In fact, we have invited Stephan's Privacy International colleague Simon Davies to review and criticize our structures and initiatives, and have tried to act on his recommendations just as we would act on the recommendations of world-renouned security experts or other leading thinkers.

So I'm interested in the disconnect Stephan and I have in our perceptions.  Is it because Microsoft hasn't communicated broadly enough? Or is there something substantive here?  I would really like to understand. 

In terms of Stephan's comments about Vista being controlling in some way, I just don't understand at all.  It's the opposite of what we were trying to do.

Not everything about Vista is perfect, but we have been very hard core about putting our customers totally in control.  User-centriic is a big deal for me, and for everyone I know.  So are open interfaces and protocols.  I don't understand his objection to our “trusted computing” effort. 

So Stephan, let me know what you're thinking, and let's try to figure this out.

 

Identity Selector Permutations

Check out this interesting set of Identity Selector Permutations posted by Paul Madsen on his ConnectID blog.

In trying to make sense of the various combinations of OS, browser, plugins etc for enabling a client with a Cardspace compatible identity selector, I created the following graphic (click to enlarge…)

Caveat: It's almost certainly wrong in places, and doesn't account for Higgins.  

 

Update: Neil Macehiter adds some details.

  • Chuck's extension appears to require Firefox 2
  • XMLDAP requires Java 1.5
  • CardSpace on XP requires .NET Framework 3

  • #1 is the all Microsoft scenario
  • #2 ties Firefox into the Cardspace identity selector through the selector from Kevin Miller.
  • #3 ties Firefox into Cardspace through Kevin's plug-in, but allows for the scenario of a user choosing to use a different identity selector than Cardspace
  • #4 is Chuck Mortimer‘s Firefox plugin as an alternative identity selector to Cardspace.
  • #5 is a non-Cardspace identity selector for Safari.