Native support for browsers in OpenID V.Next

Chris Messina chris.messina at gmail.com
Thu May 20 17:13:23 UTC 2010


I would suggest providing these ideas to the Firefox team working on the
account manager:

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/accountmanager/
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Labs/Weave/Identity/Account_Manager

The best way to move this work/concept forward is to develop working
prototypes that provide some direction here. Microsoft has been pushing
InfoCards for several years which aims to do something very similar and
would also be worth investigating for completeness.

You might also be interested in the conceptual mockups that I did with
Mozilla last fall:

http://factoryjoe.com/social-agent

Chris

On Thu, May 20, 2010 at 6:22 AM, Santosh Rajan <santrajan at gmail.com> wrote:

> I would like to see OpenID V.Next include native browser support for OpenID
> in V.Next. This has a key advantage that it will vastly improve the security
> and privacy implications for OpenID.
>
> OpenID so far has only considered two parties involved in the dance. The OP
> and RP. If we can farm out some parts of the dance to the browser vendors we
> can bring the assertion mechanism much closer to the user (currently
> residing with the OP).
>
> I will explain this with a simple flow here.
>
> 1) In V.Next we allow the RP's to farm out discovery and (Re) direction to
> the OP by the browser. Here is one example we can do it. The RP can indicate
> to the browser that it will accept native browser support by providing a
> link element.
> <link rel="openid.v.next.return_to" href="
> https://example.com/openid_return_to"/>
> 2) The browser detects this and when the user posts a form with a text
> element named "openid_identier", the browser intercepts this post and
> performs discovery on the users identifier.
> 3) Now the browser will follow the exact same discovery process the RP
> would have other wise followed and get the JRD/XRD. The browser then formats
> the proper request and directs the user to the OP. Remember this is
> directing as against redirecting. So we are safe from phishing attacks here.
> 4) The OP then redirects the User to the return_to URL, with the required
> tokens etc.
> 5) The RP gets the assertion verified directly and gets all the required
> data (artifact binding data) back.
>
> I have already tested this with OpenID 2.0 by modifying the firefox browser
> using jetpack, and using direct verification of OpenID 2.0. So I can assure
> you that the idea works.
>
> Ofcource there is a lot of work to be done. Especially getting the browser
> vendors on board.
>
>
> All we need to do is to get the browser vendors on board and get the work
>
>
>
> --
> http://hi.im/santosh
>
>
>
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>
>


-- 
Chris Messina
Open Web Advocate, Google

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