Commentary by Mark Wahl, CISA
Organizing principles for identity systems:
Digital ID World and OpenID URLs (20070925)
There were numerous blog announcements of France Telecom mentioning support for OpenID in their session "Advanced Identity Management in Telco environnement: Challenges of multi-play Identity Convergence" at the DIDW conference (DIDW2007). Some of the caveats discussed did not seem to find their way into some of the existing blog posts, such as
France Telecom/Orange have not yet announced their support for OpenID to their DSL or mobile customers.
The ability to get an OpenID is likely to be marketed just to the
techie
subsegment (~15%) of their customers, and it is anticipated that some segments of their customer base will never be interested in OpenID, in particular as the idea of having to remember and enter a long, arbitrary URL in web forms is a significant barrier to gaining access to a service, as compared to behind-the-scenes SSO the customers might be more familiar with.That OpenID require the user to enter a personally-identifying URL at arbitrary Relying Party web sites raised privacy concerns to France Telecom. France Telecom did not auto-assign OpenIDs to their customers, as it would have exposed their existing customers' user identifiers (currently private to the customer-FT relationship). A customer might not wish to be required to have their userid become exposed in an OpenID URL.
The 'right hand side' user-specific identifiers in France Telecom OpenID URLs will be short text words, and these will be assigned on a first-come-first-served basis with no correlation required to the customer's identifier they use at FT/Orange web sites. The first France Telecom customer who decides to get the OpenID URL ".../john" will get to have "/john". It was predicted that there will be "trading of the France Telecom OpenIDs on eBay", so it's not particularly clear what value these OpenIDs will provide to relying party sites for authentication purposes over any other arbitrary OpenID identity provider.