Liberty Alliance Plans Passport Interoperability

EvanDelay writes "The Liberty Alliance Project, which is developing Web technology to facilitate single sign-on authentication, plans to support interoperability between its system and Microsoft Corp.'s rival Passport system. Computerworld has the story."

Comments

Nice for us.

[miffo.swe]

I really hope it will work with linux. If it does we will have a free ride onto passport-only sites. I cant imagine MS letting off a passport client for linux by themselves (or anyone using it for that matter).

Timing and Priorities

[e8johan]

This is too early to give in to Microsoft. As neither version has any significant market advantage yet it is not good to make the systems one-way compatible. This only makes it easier for customers to move to .Net, not the otherway around.

The priority must be to compete with .Net, not to become the little brother of it. There are a number of points that need to be equally good/better than .Net:

1. Ease of use (both user-wise and coder-wise).
2. Security and user control of information
3. User base (on both sides again).

The first point is the reason of the project from the start and must be maintained.
The second point is the advantage, no-one can reach me, and on-one can reach the customer-records of a competing company without authorization. Not only geek users should be afraid of giving too much info away, also the companies utilizing these platforms must be aware and protect their customer bases.
The third point is probably the pass/fail issue of the entire project. It must get adopted, from the average user and by the service providing companies.

Re:Timing and Priorities

[Cloud 9]

As neither version has any significant market advantage yet

Wrong, amigo. Ever sign up for a Hotmail account? You were automatically signed up for Passport as well.
In other words, for the Liberty Alliance, the fight was pretty much over before it began.

Re:DO we want that?

[IamTheRealMike]

But personally, i agree with what another Slashdot reader said: its the browser's job to look after a user's password. a single username and password for all your site's is absolutly retarded security-wise.

No, it's extremely smart security wise. Now, for all I know you may be the paragon of good security practice, but most people are not. In fact, most people, faced with a morass of passwords for various different services do something that is extremely bad and set all their passwords to the same thing. I've done this, for instance, because it's either that or write down all my passwords (which of course some people do) and keep them on my computer, which means I cannot access any services when I don't have that list.

There is this fantastically common misconception that centralising your various digital identities will somehow decrease security. Not true! There's a reason most of us have 1 (perhaps 2) personal email accounts. We don't have 100 email accounts with different user names and passwords because the truly minor increase in security that would bring is nowhere near worth the major increase in hassle.

Single sign on is coming people, and when it arrives not only will 95% of the computer using population be more secure because of it, but computers will be dramatically easier to use as well.

I've read the liberty specs in more detail than most of the people here on slashdot I'd bet, as I'm working on a server that contains an (open source) implementation of them. No, it's not released yet, perhaps in a few months. But believe me, the LA specs are not scary, they will not force you to tell the government what your favourite colour is, they will not take your first born child. They will make your life easier.

I thought Passport was dead.

[Futurepower(R)]

In the past, Passport has been shown to have zero security. See the Wired News article, Stealing MS Passport's Wallet.

On August 8, 2002, the U.S. Government's Federal Trade Commission (FTC) ordered Microsoft to stop lying about its Passport service. The FTC's order is titled Microsoft Settles FTC Charges Alleging False Security and Privacy Promises.

From: Windows XP Shows the Direction Microsoft is Going.

A few things for people who didn't read it

[IamTheRealMike]

1) This is merely an offer from the Alliance to Microsoft. MS probably won't take it up.

2) Even if they did decide to co-operate, it'd largely be meaningless. There are so few websites using Passport the list can fit into less than a screenful.

3) Even if this wasn't a problem, making Passport interoperate with anything would be a major technical headache. It simply wasn't designed for that at all. It's centralised so badly it'd need to be ripped apart and rebuilt to allow for "federation". Notice how that using Kerberos to open it up idea seems to have faded away? That's because Kerby was never meant for that anyway, and because it's extremely hard to open up Passport.

4) Passport is growing at a snails pace, with good reason. The gain you get from it is small (often the user needs to give a password anyway, regardless of whether they use passport or not) and the cost is huge, both in developer time and various costs involved in working with Microsoft.

Re:DO we want that?

[AJWM]

There is this fantastically common misconception that centralising your various digital identities will somehow decrease security. Not true!

Absolutely true. The annals of computer crime are full of cases where crackers have accessed systems B, C, D and E by harvesting passwords from system A and users re-used the same password on those other systems. Now true, if those other systems had some other gaping hole that would let them be compromised without a password, then in some theoretical absolute sense the security isn't any less because of the shared password (since there was no real security to start with), but such holes are bugs and fixable by the sysadmin, whereas shared passwords are not.

Single sign-on, whether Passport or Liberty Alliance, seems like a disaster waiting to happen, although if properly designed and correctly implemented (bloody big "if"), it'd be safer than multiple sign-ons all using the same password (because the latter gives multiple points of attack). But it's also painting a huge target and sign on itself that says "crack me!". And it's still less-safe than multiple sign-on with different passwords. (Think about it -- if you're a big-time crook (or terrorist, etc), do you go for the high-stakes bank job, or just stick up a string of 7-11s? It all comes down to effort vs payoff.)

Trust is the bottom line

[kbielefe]

Why would I give Microsoft the password for my doctor's or stock trading website when I won't give my own family members the root password to my computer?

While I may trust Liberty Alliance more than Microsoft, I still would prefer to manage my passwords myself. Single sign on just provides a single point of attack.

Re:DO we want that?

[IamTheRealMike]

Single sign-on, whether Passport or Liberty Alliance, seems like a disaster waiting to happen, although if properly designed and correctly implemented (bloody big "if"), it'd be safer than multiple sign-ons all using the same password (because the latter gives multiple points of attack). But it's also painting a huge target and sign on itself that says "crack me!".

Possibly, but bear in mind if you break into somebodies email account you can usually compromise most of their web passwords anyway, as almost all sites have an "email me my password feature". In effect, your email account is your digital identity, as it holds the keys to all your other passwords too. So that's also a pretty big target in a way, yet email breakins are fairly rare - possibly because people recognise its importance and choose good passwords?

Irony

[Dirtside]

Yeah, let's hear it for the Liberty Alliance! You know, because I always associate "liberty" with "centralization of power and resources," as opposed to, "distrbution of power so that people may have more control over their destinies." 'Cause, you know, that would suck.

(My weapon is the razor-sharp sting of sarcasm!)