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Passport vs. Plan 9
netphilter writes "LinuxWorld is carrying an article about how Apache and Plan 9 are going to defeat Microsoft's Passport. I hate Passport's integration with XP (although that might be because I hate XP). An Open Source single-sign on would be a real blessing. Will we ever get a good single sign-on solution?"
The question should be: Do we really want a single sign in solution? I don't like passport, or its integration into XP and I probably won't like a Linux version. Single sign in sounds terribly insecure. I suppose the Linux version might be more secure since as Microsoft says, their products aren't made for security.
FoundNews.com - get paid to blog.,
Here I was worried that a company with billions of dollars would be able to dominate the market with their single sign on technology, but apparently some technology I have never heard of that is named after an Ed Wood movie will defeat it.
Can we mod the article -1, Presumputous?
Do not taunt Happy Fun Ball(TM)
but isn't the biggest thing against single-sign-on the fact that there's a single point of failure? why would open source change that?
FreeBSD for the impatient.
Not only does Passport go against the KISS philosophy embraced by many Unix and Linux developers, but the potential for security breaches is only magnified when a single universal authentication system is developed. It seems to me we'd be better off leaving authentication procedures up to the individual site owner rather than having a universal authentication protocol built-into Apache. This would also be a more practical solution as a single authentication system cannot be tailored to fit all sites. I sure don't want to trust all of my on-line bank transactions to something like Passport, so the need exists for highly encrypted ultra-secure authentication on some sites, while other less secure sites like Slashdot which transmit passwords across the 'net in plain text could probably get by with using a much more basic authentication system.
-atrowe: Card-carrying Mensa member. I have no toleranse for stupidity.
Will we ever get a good single sign-on solution?
Yes; several of them.
Wait a minute...
An open source sign on would have to store passwords and usernames in a database. Where would this data be stored, who would maintain it and whos going to pay for the upkeep. Single Sign in is really just away to capture all the data a site needs in order to sort and display ads that might interest the user. Sometimes its really cool to have personalized web experiences but where do we draw the line. When passport came out I remember saying, "Ill never use that" But as larger sites incorporated it in I found it to be useful. I think that SUN will have the answer with their new N1 plans.
pretzel_logic
Plan 10: Blank Passwords.
/. that I can
Why Plan 10? Heres why...
1) No one cares about me
2) Steal my credit cards they're maxed out anyways
3) I probably wouldn't mind if you changed my investments you probably would make more money that I do in the stock market
4) All of my email is mailing lists and spam, I have no friends
5) You could probably accumulate more karma on
6) Sneak preview of my bank account $0.02 (which I'm giving away here right now)
7) My social security number has been reused more times than the sayings "going forward" and "at the end of the day" combined
8) All passwords are hackable by the NSA anyways
9) At some point all information will be decrypted
10) You can have my body, but you cant take my mind
(B) + (D) + (B) + (D) = (K) + (&)
I too will question the very advisability of single sign on. There are good reasons I keep multiple banking, credit card and merchant accounts. I specifically * don't want* one single authority to be tracking my every move. I * don't want* all my finacial and personal assets and records piled up in one location. I keep a *diversified* portfolio.
What good is having your system backed up on removable media if your house burns down and * you don't have a copy off site?*
When Egghead was hacked I knew for a fact that I had to be concerned about *one* of my credit card accounts. I could watch that *one* like a hawk and the risk didn't steamroll through my whole life. The argument is, of course, that there is less risk with a well protected central account, but that account is an all or nothing sort of deal. You're either safe, or you lose everything.
I'll take the slightly greater overall risk at sustaining *some* sort of loss against the lower risk of complete and total devestation.
Do you have sort of financial insurance? Say on your car? Exact same deal. You "lose" your insurance payment against the protection from greater potential loss.
Obviously others disagree but I think that single access is just plain dumb, and all to save you a rather miniscule risk to save a few minutes of typing a year.
KFG
>Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't Solaris on
>version 9 or something?
"Solaris 7", "Solaris 8", and "Solaris 9" are actually 2.7, 2.8, and 2.9 respectively.
To add confusion, internally it's SunOS 5.x.
-l
Will we ever get a good single sign-on solution?
Yeap. This is really easy.
all you need is just enter "linux single" during lilo startup.
Kludges like NIS+ and FNS could be made to work for as long as the sysadmins wore their lucky underwear,...
Good journalist will provide resource links to where one can buy lucky underwear.
Please reply if you know of any, please...
Single Sign On (SSO) works within a limited realm under the same control, such as within the scope of a government agency, a corporation, or a school. These bodies already exist deal with issues of various policies including privacy policies within the scope of the "realm" (i.e. the laws of the nations a multinational corporation is functioning within).
Universial SSO, such as this plan and Passport, breaks that and cannot be consistant since different companies want different privacy policies, are governed by different government legistation, yet are suppose to "control" and use the same information (the online identity credientials).
So the goal of only needing one online identity, whether a username/password, or a PIN and smartcard, within a given controlled realm such as your university does make sense. This is possible through sensible use of existing services like directory services and secure network authentication. The use of directory services such as X.400, RADIUS, and more recently LDAP (and LDAP perversions like Active Directory) can help towards this. As well as secure network authentication like Kerberos.
Universial SSO does not make sense, because of the shift of power and control is not carefully thought out in the contexts of legal issues (privacy, evidence, children online protection), contractual issues, limited and total revocation, ownership, and other issues.
Universial identities for an unlimited number of purposes does not make sense, it is a nightmare of management logistics, a total lack of correctness, legal quandary, and telemarketing hell.
This will also be The Day for Increased Finger Theft.
Mordor...a magical, mythical land where women are more rare than dragons--but where every man would rather find a dragon
It's a common misunderstanding what "single signon" actually means. Even in this article that doesn't cover Passport in detail, when indicating the passport authentication process, look at step 3:
#3 Which redirects it back to its authorized Passport server
Notice that it's not "the" passport server, it's "its authorized...". The passport server may or may not be at Microsoft!
I'm busy setting up an LDAP server to allow a rapidly growing (and I do mean RAPIDLY growing, 4x growth in the last year) ISP to scale. We need to allow for future virtual servers, FTP, email, etc. and do so with a single authentication scheme.
LDAP does all this, and more, in a distributed, secure and encrypted fashion. Why are we bothering with HTTP "web services", when LDAP will do all this and lots more?
(Scratches head)
"Single Signon" doesn't mean there's some Microsoft server someplace the whole world logs in to, it means there's ONE server provided by somebody you trust, that authenticates you as YOU and which manages information on your behalf to determine what you should be granted/denied access to. You sign in once, and have immediate access to all the services you have set up.
There can be any number of authentication servers!
Passport, Plan 9, Kerberos, LDAP, and to a lesser extent, NIS and a few others give that ability!
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
haahhhhahahah
i love keeping track of 40 accounts/passwords.
Who said you had to do that?
We have already solved the problem of single password authentication, it is built right into SSH. Basically, you send you public key to anyone you want to authenticate to. Your private key resides on your computer and is password protected. A local key agent manages your private key. When you authenticate the first time, your key agent asks you for your private key's password. Note that this password is never transmitted over the network, neither is the private key. The key agent makes it unnecessary to enter the password again for any site that has your public key, a real single sign on for any system that has your public key.
Even if your system is compromised, your private key is protected by the passphrase you set for it. If the Internet sites are compromised, all the attacker gets are worthless public keys.
Why hasn't someone implemented this instead of this passport silliness? The technology has been around to do this right, why do people keep trying to do it wrong?
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Start/Run/RunDll32 advpack.dll,LaunchINFSection %windir%\INF\msmsgs.inf,BLC.Remove
This worked for me. It finally stopped telling me to register my .NET Passport, and doesn't run Messenger all the time.
Here is a site with more info: http://www.kellys-korner-xp.com/xp_messenger.htm
PS: Am I violating the DMCA by posting this? Well I'm not an American citizen, but if I was?
Random is the New Order.
right about the same time when Linux gets a single unified desktop/window manager.
-ted
"My friends, can your hearts stand the shocking facts about grave robbers from outer space?"
"Ah yes, Plan 9 deals with the resurrection of the dead. Long distance electrodes shot into the pineal pituitary glands of recent dead."
"Sometimes in the night when it does get a little lonely I reach over and touch it, then it doesn't seem so lonely anymore."
"Because all you of Earth are idiots!"
How ya like dat?
factotum (plan 9's authentication agent) is not a single sign-on solution, although it can be when used in conjunction with secstore. what it does mean is that applications do not have to be burdened with complex and error-prone authentication code, and that there is one, well-verified, point in the system that holds secrets and understands the protocols.
in the factotum scheme, you can mark certain accounts (e.g. your bank account access) so that they will always require a password to be entered; you can also use the scheme without secstore (which is what i'm doing currently) which just forces you to type in each password the first time it's required. secstore is a means to store all your passwords in one place securely, which you can then use to prime factotum.
this is the essence of the plan 9 approach - choose an abstraction and write it in a simple, modular way so that it's applicable to a wide range of previously unanticipated scenarios. it's a wonderful system, and one that carries forward the true unix tradition, something that UNIX lost long ago.
I once joined a startup that was based on a good idea that incorporated SSO, but the VP of Engineering swore to me the company would never abuse that power. Within months, marketing managers were telling me that end users "wanted" us to abuse SSO "for their own good." For legal reasons, I won't go into more detail, but the company I left was not the company I joined -- all because of the temptation SSO brings.
End Users believe that SSO is a gift from heaven because it allows them to mindlessly go through the "troublesome" task of authenticating themselves. This has several implications:
- Authentication is designed to require you to use your brain. It's like the roughed-up pavement that precedes many toll booths, saying, "you're going to need to wake up now."
- Authentication is designed to require you to use your brain. It helps ensure that you are the only one who has access to certain data. You should not be entrusting this to a conscience-free multinational who has no qualms about "sharing" your access with all its employees, partners and anyone who pays them enough money.
- One of the places most consumers often see authentication forms are on shopping sites. When you are going to buy something, you have to go through the steps of entering your username and password, entering your credit card number, your address, etc. It's a protective speed bump that makes you think before you purchase. With SSO (or One-Click), you have no way of knowing when you've "authorized" a charge to your credit card. You assume that it's only when you click a button, but the fact is you've authorized the company to charge your card whenever it claims you want to buy something.
- Single point of failure. Enough said.
- Memory decay. When you use SSO, you tend to forget your user names and passwords because you don't need them. Then when your SSO provider does something you don't like and you decide to leave, you feel like you can't. You're trapped because you can't remember that data -- you think you need that service to continue accessing your other services. Even if the SSO service provides a method of retrieving your passwords, most users are unaware of it.
- Then, of course, there are the tracking issues. The SSO provider will track all the sites you visit, sell that data and market appropriately. Common sense, yet commonly ignored by the common End User.
A wise wizard would do well to distance himself and everyone he can from this evil.Paul Murphy (the LW author of the article) seems to have been fooled by the Plan9 folk's self-proclaimed status as "Open Source". However, neither the OSI nor the FSF agrees. The FSF has even posted a detailed analysis of the problems with the Plan9 license.
Now, depending on your own philosophy (or lack thereof), you may or may not care personally whether this code is truly free/OSS/whatever, but in practical terms, what it means is that neither Red Hat nor Debian is going to buy into this solution, which pretty much means that it's probably dead in the water. Oh, I suppose it might be accepted by the UnitedLinux folks, but I'm not holding my breath on that.