OpenID: The RESTful approach to Single Sign-On
December 7, 2006 § Leave a comment
regular
work, but a friend recently
suggested I check out OpenID
— the de facto distributed authentication standard for Web 2.0. I think of it
as “Decentralized Kerberos for the Internet”, in that provides the ability to do
Single Sign-On without the need for everyone to agree on a single directory
server or implement a bunch of hairy
protocols.
If I understand
it correctly, all you need is:
Provider (usually, but not necessarily, a username and password)
with an autodiscovery link to one or more Providers (like the links to RSS/Atom
feeds)
If you’re
ambitious/paranoid, you can even be your own provider. The reason is that the
“principal” (globally unique identifier) is really the URL (or a weird mutant
threof, like an XRI).
All the Provider does is validate that you (as defined by your login information
with them) have access to that URL. That’s it — pure authentication, no
authorization whatsoever. All it is doing is ensuring that nobody else can claim
that URL.
To use it, you
just tell a Consuming website, “Hey, this is my URL: I’d like to use it as my
OpenID identifier on your website.” Then, they deference that URL, find its
Provider, and (if necessary) jump you over to the Provider’s website to
authenticate (and, optionally — if you allow — get your basic
name/email/contact data). Once that’s done, they can let you setup a local
‘nickname’ (not globally unique) to avoid the need for the complete URL.
Importantly, though, you never have to give a password (or any data you’d like
to keep private) to any Consuming site, and
they
never (really) need to trust the Provider; they just trust DNS and HTTP
(hopefully HTTPS) to ensure that you really have the right to claim that
link.
Now, in practice
there will probably be concerns about spoofing, so Consuming sites will have
whitelists, and which is why you may need multiple Providers to ensure they have
one that works everywhere they need it. But — crucially — all of that is an
out-of-band business opportunity. The protocol itself is (so I’m told) drop-dead
simple, so that (if you’re starting from scratch) you can get up and running in
a couple hours, especially if you leverage the pre-built libraries for PHP,
Ruby, Python, etc.
Most
importantly, it sounds like they really believe the “collaborative intelligence”
part of the Web 2.0 hype. They’re working with Dick of
Sxip,
Technorati,
and even some SAML
refugees. If they can keep everyone happy without falling prey to bloatware,
they may really have
something.
And oh yeah:
their protocol appears to be thoroughly RESTful,
so it plays nicely with the web.
Woot!
References
below.
iHack, therefore iBlog 