Making identities persistent?

Stefan Görling stefan at gorling.se
Wed Nov 1 15:51:59 UTC 2006


The reasons for raising this question was partly that I've been doing 
some research on how people use e-mail addresses and sad to say, you can 
not expect the user to make wise choices. And even so, companies go 
broke even the best ones. Services comes and disappear. In my research 
over half of the population use non-portable e-mail addresses tied to an 
employer, university, etc. and is likely to only live a few years.

E-mail is not a stable address/identity identifier. We must not rely on 
it as such.

If we want an identity to be persistent, it must contain a migration 
feature, so that I can move all their trust relations from one place to 
another. This of course creates a number of other issues such as 
security and complexibility, but it is my sincere belief that the issue 
should be addressed by the system and not only delegated to be dependent 
on wise user decisions.

Therefore, my +1 is on (1) below. I will try to read back on what has 
been said in the past on a 'change identifier' extension and see if 
there is anything I can do to help.

/Stefan

> Yes, this is important thing I thought. We should privide a spec for 
> the consumer to change their end user's OpenID URL, optionally the end 
> user can use multiple OpenIDs in this consuemr. And this case can be 
> expended as this, the IdP(OpenID Server) is closed down.
>
> 2006/10/31, George Fletcher <gffletch at aol.com <mailto:gffletch at aol.com>>:
>
>     This is a good use case and I think important for both users and
>     IdPs (now OPs [OpenID Provider] per the latest "editor's
>     conference") to consider.
>
>     I see a number of options...
>
>     1. There has been some discussion regarding a "change identifier"
>     extension that would allow you to change your identifier at the
>     relying party.  This would solve the use case and is necessary
>     regardless of the other options.
>
>     2. The OP (in this case AOL.com) could continue to provide an
>     "identifier management" page that would allow the user to specify
>     the OP of choice.  This requires the OP to continue to serve the
>     XRDS doc or at least the indirection to a XRDS doc with the new
>     OP.  This is not that much extra overhead for the OP, but it will
>     likely be a business decision as to whether to support such a feature.
>
>     3. The user gets to choose their OP so they can ensure that they
>     don't get "locked in".  This is the ideal behind user-centric. 
>     However, in practice, it will take good education and time for
>     users to understand the ramifications of their decisions.
>
>     Thanks,
>     George
>
>     Stefan Görling wrote:
>
>>Hi everybody,
>>
>>I'm trying to get a grip around your great work and have one issue that 
>>I'm not quite clear on, relevant to the discussion of using 
>>
>>user at example.com-style <mailto:user at example.com-style> identifiers, but also in a more general context. 
>>Please let me know if I've simply missunderstood my own question.
>>
>>
>>http://openid.net/specs/openid-authentication-2_0-09.html#anchor48 says:
>>"OpenID is decentralized. No central authority must approve or register 
>>Relying Parties or Identity Providers. An End User can freely choose 
>>
>>which Identity Provider to use. They can preserve their Identifier if 
>>they switch Identity Providers."
>>
>>Let us consider the case that I'm an AOL.com customer, and they act as 
>>an IdP providing we with an identifier. I use this identifier for 3 
>>
>>years for identity management on most of the services I use, due to the 
>>huge success of the standard... However, I'm starting to get fed up with 
>>AOL and terminates my agreement with them. Is there any procedure for me 
>>
>>to switch to another IdP? How is this done?
>>
>>Best Regards,
>>
>>Stefan Görling
>>
>>
>>
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