Let's review too

Mike jones reported the availability of the Identity Metasystem Interoperability Version 1.0. This looks good news to me, progress being made, so all hands on deck for reviewing.

Behavior centric identity management

What's the problem with people knowing my identity attributes, my personal data? Okay, not all data are public, but why should I hide my identity? What personal data should I protect?

I have been thinking about this privacy thing a lot lately. Partly because we have to protect privacy stuff by law. But we protect all information, you might say that all privacy data are protected implicitly if we live by our security policy, right?

The reasoning behind my thoughts is that there are several initiatives to use authentication services like OpenID. And I hesitate. And you know, the problem is that I want to keep my behavior private. That's it, I don't mind third parties knowing me, or part of me, but what I do, that's my business. What I do may lead to some status change of my identity, and that may be publicly known, but my behavior is mine.

We have been exploring some identity aspects and perhaps that we will be able to classify security requirements based on identity aspects.
We learned about Identity DNA, fixed attributes, like name, sexe, date of birth, even Social Security Number. The data elements will (almost) never change. It is so fixed, that it is even public, so why protect the confidentiality aspect?
Next you might talk about Identity Status, information that will change. Like an address, phone number, relationships (even commercial relations, like "customer of", the data that is to be protected because of privacy laws?). Protecting confidentiality might not be needed for all identities by default, but it may be economic to do so.
And then there must be something like Identity Behavior. This must be the most sensitive part of identity data. This is the knowledge part. That's why voting machines are no go right now. That's why financial and medical information are valuable. I want to protect this information. I don't care about my identity DNA, can't change that, but the acts of my identity are personal. Publishing my identity status is my responsibility (I can move, or not, get a new job or not), it's public within the context of my identity, but what I do whit it is my business.

So much for now, perhaps this is way to academic. But at least I got it off my chest.

Community effort

I just like to point to the ibpedia.nl community project, that aims to be a research portal for information security professionals.
The project was started by a few Dutch enthusiasts, who (in vain) tried to use wikipedia for knowledge sharing. Due to the fact that a lot of knowledge was still in research phase, wikipedia could not host the items, so a new wiki was started.

ibpedia got its name form the ib abbreviation: Informatie Beveiliging, Information Security for those who are not familiar with the Dutch language. But, there's also a lot of content in English.

The content of ibpedia is published under a creative commons license, so free to share and add to. Don't hesitate to join the community.

Results from Ian's identity Management survey

Ian Yip posted the results from his earlier survey. Lots of interesting pictures and I am curious about any further analysis.
You can find the results over here.

An IdM survey

For those interested, there's a survey on outsourcing Identity Management. You can find it over here.

RBAC limitations in SOA

For a few years we have been working within a SOA environment and we implemented some form of the RBAC security paradigm. But since a few iterations of our SOA we feel that we arrive at the limits of RBAC. RBAC is fine within a single security domain, like an application, but as soon as you cross your security borders, like you will do in a SOA, you run against problems.

Some RBAC limitations in SOA

• In RBAC you still have to manage every user account and bind these accounts to roles. Unknown accounts can only be linked to a default role, like guest or customer. But users coming in through the Internet channel are not only guests or customers, but they can also be employees, partners, external service providers, you name it. There may be plenty accounts you don't want to manage, because they don’t belong to your security domain. Unless you manage different portals for different roles and have some form of identity management within the portal environment in place, RBAC is of no use.
  Federation could be a solution, but that only limits interaction possibilities to trusted partners you federate with. Besides, most federeation solutions use shadow accounts within the security domains, thereby creating a new identity management problem because all duiplication. Silly, but if you want RBAC, you pay for it…


• RBAC has a problem with the concept of context. If someone has a role, then he will get the permissions associated with that role. Automatically. There is no restriction in place based on the concept of context. A context could be the channel used (internet, lan), time of day, legal entity etc. An account using a wireless home PC might not deserve the same permissions as the same account in an office using a centrally managed workplace. But such a concept does not exist in RBAC terms (unless you define lots of extra roles). RBAC must always be complemented with a rule-based access control function.


• Another big objection (but that is not specifically SOA) is that there is no possibility for user profiling. Meaning authorisation based on the skills of an employees instead of the single fact that the user is connected to a role. RBAC doesn’t know the difference between junior or senior employees within the same role. Unless you define separate roles. And creating duplicate roles is not why you implement RBAC.


• Another problem (also not specifically SOA): role mining. Have you ever tried mining roles? How many roles have you identified? How many unique roles are absolutely necessary? Often mining is an useless excercise. But without mining roles it is hardly possible to define the necessary authorizations. Or is the role the object that you want to manage?

There are more issues, probably, but for us this was sufficient to declare RBAC ‘Old School’. We will continue to apply RBAC for some specific uses, but we will not implement RBAC as a dogma and certainly not within our SOA. We are studying new authorization paradigms, probably using the SAML Claims mechanism.
Identity management will be replaced by identity Provisioning and identity management will no longer be core business for most organizations. Access Control will stay core business, but no longer based on the user part and will also no longer be based on roles.

A Wordle picture of thousand words

Great idea, thanks Kalya: