The memo points out that the current security measures on the web are designed for static text-based one-site content, whereas the current web is real-time, multi-site and has moved from documents to mobile code. Some of the issues with passwords are pointed out, and three types of goals are presented:

1. Reduce the number of passwords used
2. Increase the safety and security of how passwords are used
3. Broaden the use of other credentials

Proposed guiding principles:

• moving authentication down into the platform: Methinks not letting every single web developer reinvent the security wheel is a good thing
• design for growth and multiple authentication mechanisms and credentials: the world changes,
• context matters: exposing minimal information depends on getting context sorted out
• transform long-term password to short-term credentials: the sloppy practices of not verifying end points will come back to haunt us
• keep the user experience in mind: investigate failure scenarios and provide user feedback.
• go from client-server to N-Party: Federated login and other multiple party solutions

Please read the Internet draft and give feedback to the authors!

And then my friends started to warn me. Luckily one of them warned me by text message, since Friday night is mostly family time and I am offline. Twitter does not run my life, it is but a small part of my online presence. And snuggling up to the kids take precedence. But the message talked of danger, and I did not know what else was compromised on my PC/mobile/iPad. It was time to take back control of twitter

1. Change twitter account password
2. Revoke application privileges (I had 25 apps with privileges registered, only one from the malicious site)
3. Start tidying up app passwords, since leaving this undone may lead to blocked twitter account due to large number of failed logins
4. Delete messages with malicious content, wading through all streams I have sent.

The rough statistics for usability is

1. 35% of the people will understand, almost no matter what you write or do
2. 40% will have cognitive challenges at some times
3. 25% do have special challenges understanding

Given this, and the fact that most web sites aim at the population at large, we really need to rethink the mental load we place on our users.

• the right not to be stalked or persecuted (whistle blowers, abuse survivors,  people from small communities, sexual minorities)
• wanting to have multiple persona, choosing nick names presenting yourself, celebrities (Lady Gaga, Bob Dylan, Madonna …)
• being able to voice personal opinions without being associated with employer (academics, fans, bloggers, journalists, military)

Earlier this year, SXSW discussed Social Network Users’ Bill of Rights, and there was agreement on most of the points proposed. The one point with most discussion (and least agreement) was the right to use pseudonyms. Kim Cameron commented on his blog that imposing pseudonyms on all social sites breaks the laws of identity.

In Norway we have a debate about how public online discussion forums may avoid hateful and cesspit discussion. There is a need for participants to be held accountable for their opinions, but in my opinion not necessarily to expose legal identities. The federations in higher education are currently handling both Real Names, nicknames and pseudonymous/anonymous access

1. Real Names are present in the identity management system, because the universities need these names to issue formal credentials (PhDs, MS etc) and bind the formal credentials to formal legally registered names.
2. Nicknames are present in the attribute definitions, but we are still in the process of sorting out what are the most practical ways of sharing this information. There is ongoing debate about consent and necessity for attribute sharing, and displayName is an attribute we need to think more about. Feide decided to require both legal name (Real Name = norEduLegalName) and preferred name (nick = displayName)
3. Federations provide anonymous traceable access, based on technology for per service unique identifiers .

We need to find a balance online, as we have for other aspects of public space where we do not need to post information about identities for each person, but in many cases require that identity is traceable. Minimal exposure of information is good, but defining minimal is difficult.

• Even if a vendor claim to support SAML, they are unable to consume attributes. And the provisioning of attributes include both sensitive, restricted and open information.
• Proprietary extensions are used for too many of our solutions
• Credential relays, operated by non-trusted third party (or SP). Preferably combined with non-maintenance of SP software?
• Why not just use AD? Believing that using AD will automagically  integrate all services.

When we first started work on federated identity and attributes, we thought the primary use for attributes would be authorization: granting or refusing access. We were wrong. In the first two years of handing out attributes, we discovered that personalization is the primary reason for requesting information about a person. Attributes are used for personalization, and controlling attributes is under-estimated. We need to work more on attributes and how to share enough information without revealing too much. Cross-site scripting is a security threat, cross-site personalization is a risk to our integrity.  Personalization is available on most modern web sites.

The Filter Bubble points out some of the dangers for our society as the news streams get fragmented and we slide into ghettos where there is no shared reality anymore. Shared reality is important for democracy, as we need to sort out where our choices are, during a public discussion.

My sister is a public servant, working for the Norwegian government. Someone set off a bomb just outside her office less than a week ago, because he hated the current political regime, killing 8 people. He then went on to the Labor Youth summer camp, killing 68 (current number, there are several missing persons), where he was arrested. All the evidence reported by the media points to a person who has been living in a filter bubble with a strong reinforcing feedback hatred for Muslims, as explained in the Guardian by Thomas Hylland Eriksen. The terrorist has been using anonymous discussion forums online to confirm his ideas and get ideological backing. Conspiracy theories flourish in such environments.

The Filter Bubble on our Internet gets really scary when we encounter:

• There is no transparency, we do not know how reality was altered to fit us
• The invisible ghetto I live in have walls, and I believe they are the end of the world
• We have no interest in our community and cross-partisan discussion fail to deal with large (and small) political issues
• Personality tests used for job interviews gets replaced by an interpretation of the bubble the job applicant live in (there is probably an app for doing this, at least in the US, where such information is for sale). Knowing about your bubble gets more important than knowing you.
• Critical thinking is made more difficult by incongruent information, since search results and news flow differ significantly

The idea of using circles got me thinking about overlaps and how the circles could overlap. Most of the right’s management we are using today always starts out with a well defined root and hierarchical structure under the root.  I believe we need circles of rights, not hierarchies. I say this having worked both in the enterprise environment, social networks and for cross-organizational solutions. Bull’s eye is composed of concentric circles, exemplified by True friends within acquaintances/buddies/friends. This is similar to the traditional hierarchies in LDAP servers, who in practice limit us in what is easily done. Even for other services we tend to limit ourselves to this way of thinking, for example are there very few customer relation clouds that let you assign a person to two different organizations. Relations are normally with a person, not with a graph. I need persons assigned to multiple organizations because so many of my customers have more than one job or are in the process of fusion/fission for their organizations.

Child play is what Google+ circles look right now: disjunct circles you can skip around in. There is currently not much more than twitter lists or Facebook lists in the functionality. So why do I bother to spend time thinking about the potential? Because something needs to be done with the user interfaces for sharing information, and the Circles is a new kid on the block.

Some of the functionality I like about circles

• Visual guide for who is in what circle
• Drag and drop interface, still needs quite some work before escaping beta
• Ability to put people in multiple circles

Do not disturb my circles

Are we ready to take up the challenge of using flat space for rights management? It depends on the user interface, and the way circles are implemented today are several steps away from what we need

• Visualization of circles overlap: Venn diagrams
• Ability to weed out persons/circles (everybody but my cousin will get the funny pics, I want to closely follow my close friends but not the chatty girl posting too many updates)
• Sorting the list of circles, and adapting the sort to usage patterns
• Importing (and searching) from a variety of circles: people who get the same email, lists from other sources, people who live in my area, teams, my co-workers etc
• Automatic updates, reflected in the search facilities
• Scaling, for those with more than 15 people in their lives

Forget bull’s eye, give us child’s play

If a child can play with the circles and get rights management right, then the solution is good enough. Forget about building the perfect hierarchy with the single root, and get the flow going!

Internet2 has gathered a wiki of SCIM resources, to help higher education follow the development.  Some of the advantages of the SCIM proposal seem to be

• REST-support
• standardized API for cloud-ish functions
• claims to be simpler, which it really needs to be, but I want to see this IRL before I believe it

The main problem is that installing a new interface on core components (local LDAP-servers, identity management solutions) who are crucial for the day-to-day operations of the organizations involved is not an easy undertaking.  The lead time for serious changes to that part of the infrastructure is at least two years, in my experience, even for small changes like updating schema across multiple organizations.

SimpelSAMLphp 1.8 passed Kantara Interoperability testing, and does conform to the IdP lite and SP lite profiles of SAML2.0.  This means that our drive to support federated login in a multi-vendor environment has taken another step in the right direction. Many of the federations in higher education operate with a software monoculture (using Shibboleth, which is really good software), but I believe that for federated solutions to permeate every necessary application we must work with a plethora of solutions. It is most important for this to happen on the service provider (SP) side, since the variations on implementation for web applications is huge.

• More students in the Erasmus program, now around 200000 students every year
• Flexible study programs, where part of the education is given by a university not in the same town or even the same country.  The Nordic master programme is one example of join Master ‘s programmes of higher education
• Project work across institutional borders is rewarded, for example for graduate students involved in research.
• Going (back) to college for more education is more common, as the skill sets and the learning we need to be comfortable in a complex world challenge us.

Students from outside our universitites need access to both campus services and off-site applications. One challenge we face is how to integrate students from “foreign” origin into our campus identity management systems.  Nothing is more foreign than the institution in the neighbouring town, as their practices confuse us by being similar, yet different.

Some promising work that is ongoing in our community

1. Cross-federations with the same attribute set (eduPerson) enable an easy way to add users to an existing service.  Prime examples are Kalmar2 and eduGAIN.  The national federations within each country have mechanisms for sharing attributes based on eduPerson, with several extensions. Kalmar2 has made a comparison of key attributes in the participating federations.
2. RS3G work on exchanging student records on the European level, by feeding information between the student registry systems.  In Feide the student registry systems are the authoritative sources for campus identity management, so if the information is present in the student registry all is well.
3. REFEDS where the operational federations meet to sort out how federations may help with live scenarios like increasing student mobility.
4. Technical work on Identity Provider discovery and in Kantara on Universal Login Experience, attacking the student mobility scenario from the user interface and giving the student tools to sort out rights and identity management.  The other side of this puzzle is the rights management, where there is still work to do.

There have also been some work in STORK on student mobility, but so far involving individual universities, interacting with national government eID, without reaching the national level.

I believe in running code, and solutions that get used. This will probably involve the formal student registries, and some sort of interaction from the students with the federation functionality.