Commentary by Mark Wahl, CISA
Organizing principles for identity systems:
Burton Group Catalyst InfoCard implementation travails (20070627)
The Burton Group Catalyst conference presentation by Pamela Dingle "What Happened when I Stopped Thinking about Information Cards and Started Using Them. A Drama in Three Acts by Pamela Dingle" summarizes some of her experiences and discoveries when implementing InfoCards in The Pamela Project, a WordPress plugin to make a blog into a relying party.
Some of the issues she mentioned included
- it is not always clear to the user of the implication of a managed card back by a personal (self-issued) card, nor is is suggested by the selector that the personal card being thus used should be PIN-protected
- what should be the cardinality of the relationship in relying parties between accounts in the relying party's database, and information card identities? 1:1, 1:many, or many:many?
- the user and their identity provider can associate a picture with a card, but a picture cannot be set or echoed by the relying party
- the user cannot differentiate between intentionally blank claims and absent claims provided in a managed card
- the relying party cannot describe in its
policy a subset of the possible issuers
(acknowledged as a limitation of the current version of CardSpace by Kim Cameron of Microsoft) - an identity provider that has an authority relationship with a user may still issue non-authoritative claims (e.g., a DMV issues a driver's license including the user's weight and hair color, each of which the user can without the DMV caring to update the license)
- there needs to be a distributed, world-wide, rationalized identity schema