Another business case for federation

Traditionally Identity Management is almost core business for many companies. Of course we all sell products and services to consumers, but those are commodities when it comes to identifying the trouble we have managing our business. You have to comply to all kinds of laws and regulations and operating an identity business is no small task. There are lots of small processes and you have to operate in a trustworthy and secure way. And the reason? We only trust ourselves.

There are several reasons to reevaluate the need for identity management. First there is the trouble implementing the technique. Not only does it have to be secure enough, privacy laws are applicable so supervisors will be on the loose.

Second: your customers hate identity management. You're not the only one that has to manage identities, so do your customers. Identity 2.0 didn't happen just because it could.

Federation is an intriguing technique for identifying individuals. It does require another point of view, but there are many benefits. For instance you don have to manage identities, but you can have a specialist, the Identity Provider, take care of that. You only have to trust the IdP and open up your business for the new protocols. And your customers don't need yet another account and password. The can reuse an existing identity.

Last week a new business case appeared. In France new regulations require website owners to make identity information accessible to the authorities. Accounts, password, personal data. Not really what security is about. These laws apply to French companies, but perhaps also to companies dealing with French customers, although I cannot imaging how French authorities can plan to execute these regulations.

But this new development does help us to define a new business case for federation. Federation means that the relying party, the party trusting a 3^rd party IdP, doesn't have to store personal data, except for transaction data. And what you don't have, you can't lose. Or hand over to others.

Blogging on my N900

Writing blog posts is not business as usual. Most posts take a while to become published. And since I have to do more work and write some more stuff for the Dutch information security magazine, this blog gets less attention than I planned beforehand.
A new tool on my Nokia N900 smartphone (great little device) might help me writing small posts easier. Perhaps I can create a few smaller blog posts, that take less research and pondering. This is the first try...

Stork and other assurance frameworks

As I wrote earlier am involved in the Dutch OpenID.nl+ initiative to help grow the acceptance of OpenID (and to a lesser degree Information Card) in The Netherlands. Within the initiative Identity Providers and Relying Parties define an interoperability standard whereby Relying Parties can rely on digital identities from Identity Providers, based on the verification level of identity attributes by the participating Identity Providers. RP's can authorize users based on the verification information in the claims.

The Trust Framework is based on the assumption that trust derives from the reliability of the identity provider (including the reliability of the identity priovisioning process) and from the reliability of the use of a digital identity. Meaning that there are two parameters: trust in the identity as verified by the identity provider and trust in the use of an identity by the individual owning a digital identity (proof of posession). IdP's must adhere to a certification scheme to prove their reliability. The OpenID.nl+ initiative manages the white list with trusted IdP's.


International developments like STORK also define authentication assurance levels, but these levels are a combination of Identification (by the IdP) and the method of authentication (by the user, based on proof of identity). These assurance levels are the product of a mix of both parameters.


The strange issue is that for certain levels a low level of trust in the process can be compensated by using a strong form of authentication. So QAA2 can be the result of accepting an identity that's hardly verified by an identity provider, but requiring a one time password. Strangely, that would mean that the IdP may not fully know the individual who is issued a digital identity, but you know for sure that the user of the digital identity is the rightful owner of the identity. So someone logging in as Mickey Duck may not really be Mickey Duck, but he is the rightful owner of Mickey Duck's digital id.

In the OpenID.nl+ initiative the net effect may be the same, for most combinations, but the vision on trust is more distinct, the implementation offers a lot more granularity (because of the trust model), although implementing this granularity is not yet part of the roadmap.
In my opinion you shouldn't require a combined assurence level, but you should demand a certain level of trust in ownership of a digital identity and the use of a digital identity.

I will probably get this al wrong, since this model is widely accepted, but then again, maybe I'm not.

Open Trust Frameworks for Open Government

As I wrote earlier, the biggest problem in the identity 2.0 space is the absence of trustworthy public Identity Providers. I called for a trust framework that would enable differentiation in trust levels for identity providers. Of course that requires some major party to define the standards.
There is some great news about the development of a standard trust framework for identity providers. Initiated by the US Government the Open Trust Framework for Open Government was formed. In a White Paper the methods are described.

There are other initiatives, like the Dutch OpenIDPlus. Let's just hope that these initiatives will converge into an interoperable international standard.

Facebook game review Spymaster

After playing Mafia Wars for a few weeks, I accepted an invitation to join Spymaster. Spymaster is all about the spying game, you're a secret agent (either Russian, American or British) doing jobs and killing enemies. Here too you get energy and health, time based, and use it to do tasks and attacking other agents.
Gameplay is easy. Energy permitting, you select a task and do it. By doing a task you deserve more or less experience points, depending on the outcome of the task. When you get enough xp's you enter a new level and you unlock more jobs and other level adversaries.
You also earn money, that you can use to buy stuff. Weapons (to gain more attack of defense power), safe houses (to earn a steady income).

After playing for a few days, I decided to stop playing the game. It was boring. Every level you would do a task and succeed or not. You would injure an enemy or not. The 'or not' value was to big for me to enjoy the game. Due to the random results, buying weapons and attacking lesser agent seemed to make no difference. I lost some fight and I never understood why. Probably I'm not a spy.













The gameplay was a unrewarding.
The game looked complex. There are spies and spymasters in 'rings' and I never found out how people came to belong to my ring, or how many spymasters were on my side.

The atmosphere in the game was not great. The text mode screen lacked any visual clue about actions or status. Just plain white on black. The only nice feature was the ihntermezzo while wainting for the results of a fight. Gunshots or an animation of an agent on screen. That's about it.

It's a great way to gain plenty followers on Twitter. I did connect my Twitter account to Spymaster, status messages were converted to tweets. Nice if you need followers.

Facebook game review: Mafia Wars

A smart game, quite addictive. The first levels are mastered by doing Jobs. Jobs like 'Auto Theft' or 'Recruit a Rival Crew Member'. You need enough energy to do the job. And energy just grows in time (depending on the type of the character you choose up front). A job gives you hard cash and experience points. The cash can be used to buy you weapons or property. That's a second dimension of the game: buy property and protect it form robbing by the mob.

And of course there's a third dimension: you can attack and rob others. That takes health and stamina and enough attack and defence powers to beat the enemy.

Once you join the game, you do this by accepting an invitation. That is important: you belong to the mafia of the friend who invited you, but your friend belongs to your mafia. Both players and both plays are independent, but you can interact, by giving gifts to the members in your mafia. Gifts like weapons, loot items (I received a Rembrandt painting), or energy. And you can help one another by doing jobs, thereby earning money and so on.
After you learned plaing the game in New York, you can move on to Cuba. Same kind of play, but it feels a bit different, in a different atmosphere, well done.

So far the game. And does it work?
Yes, it's addictive. The first levels are mastered quite fast. But later on you will find that choices made earlier have an effect later in the game. If you decide to buy a lot of attack power, your energy will grow slowly, enabling you to do jobs less quickly. Growing a mafia family is also very important. A large family gives a lot of power and you'll need that.
Higher levels are reached less easily, larger intervals, but also greater rewards. This game requires some strategic thinking on the part of the player. Plain luck is just a small factor.

Overall, playable, untill all levels are mastered, but I haven't got there yet...

Something different: facebook game review

If you're on Facebook, you must have noticed invitations from friends to join them in an online game. A few weeks ago I decided to take part in a few games, what use is a game if you don't play it?


So I became a member of a mafia family in the Mafia Wars game. Later I got involved in Spymaster and lately I have been running a farm in Farm World.

What they have in common is how a player can grow from easy challenges to harder challenges, that get unlocked once a level is mastered. A level is mastered after a numer of experience points is reached. The first levels are reached quite fast. You win points, buy stuff and play with or against other players, who you may not even know.

These games run on top of Facebook, so they use the facebook knowledge of your friends network. And one problem may be that in order to play harder levels, you will accept invitations from other players, that you don't know. They will join your facebook network too. Be ware of this risk!

I will post a few game reviews in the next few days.