Using Passbook for Attribute Management

By now we know all there is to know about managing digital identities so the next level of access control is to further investigate managing (defining, granting and revoking) authorizations. And the ideas about granting access to resources, based on certain (user owned) attributes are gaining ground. In the future I will get access to documents, files, databases and locations based on attributes, more than because of who I am (one of my many identities).

A while back I wrote some posts ("I need a Pall or Pass" and "Attribute management") about managing attributes and about the lack of information about this issue. And I found one interesting entity providing attributes: ISACA issues attributes in the form of OpenBadges, an open standard to manage whatever attributes in a digital wallet, like Mozilla Persona.

Only recently did I come across another digital wallet system, Passbook by Apple. According to Wikipedia "Passbook is an application in iOS that allows users to store coupons, boarding passes, event tickets, store cards, credit cards as well as debit cards via Apple Pay." That's interesting. I didn't know about Passbook, because I don't own or use any iThings, but someone crafted an app for the Sailfish OS on my Jolla smartphone. So, thank you :)

A little about the purpose of Passbook: it is there to manage coupons, tickets and all. And those items are valuable items, they have to be protected. So inherently passes are secured to a certain level and Passbook must facilitate that. These items give access to certain features that were defined by the coupon or ticket provider, these permissions were defined by the owner of the resource that the ticket holder wants to have access to.

This look a lot like the owner's responsibilities that we see in regular IAM environments. Someone, an owner of a resource, a file, a database, a room, defines access rules and decides what identities can have access. Yes, not unlike any theater ticket. And yes, I did write that I need a Personal Attribute Storage System, a Pass. It could well be a Passbook...

Can we use some app like Passbook for attribute management. Yes of course, by all means. But I am curious to know if Apple created an open standard to make it feasible to use the platform elsewhere too.