[OpenID] Combining Google & Yahoo user experience research

[Chris Messina]

I don't think that it's necessarily OpenID's job to solve these specific
problems. It's really an identity protocol; trust, veracity and authenticity
(in the human sense) are, by design (and by extension, politics) purposely
kept out of scope.
Several of our companies, mine included, operate in the space afforded by
the adoption of a technology like OpenID, where you can choose to have
increasing levels of complexity, encryption, circuity and sophistication to
thwart those who would gain by attempting to act as though they were you.

Whether you verify that you're human by receiving a $1 transaction or a 5
character text message is actually an opportunity for innovation and
research, and by promoting the adoption of OpenID as a common conduit, we
enable the pre-conditions for such an industry to grow up with
consumer-facing services (as opposed to enterprise).

My girlfriend today commented that OpenID is too hard because it requires
too many steps. She wasn't talking about the authentication dance -- and she
didn't even mind typing in her blog address to sign in (she's delegated to
ClaimID.com). Instead her gripe was with the form-filling process
*immediately* following the sign in process where, even though her OpenID
provider has her name, email, bio and a bunch of other choice tidbits, the
relying party either didn't, or didn't know how to, ask for it from her IdP.
And since she had to re-enter this data *yet* again, OpenID as a whole ended
up looking bad.

The point that I'm ultimately making here is that we could sit here all day
arguing over the need to secure one's identity and how to do it, but for
most people, that's self-referential bike shed painting.

We need this stuff to just work and get out of the way (unless a user
chooses otherwise), and no user interface research is going to be complete
unless we also weigh the second order benefits of time-saving and smoother
flows that can come by enhancing the standards-based identity technologies.

To that end, I think we need to think beyond just authentication here, and
look at what happens immediately AFTER you've signed in with OpenID. How can
we make that experience intuitive, compelling, desirable and motivating? How
can we get it in people's heads that the OpenID experience is the one that
they WANT -- and the one that they should DEMAND from their favorite web
services?

If we can't improve even the basic sign up and sign in flows from where they
are today, indeed, we will continue struggle with basic issues like
awareness and adoption.

Chris

On Fri, Oct 17, 2008 at 8:50 PM, Peter Williams <pwilliams at rapattoni.com>wrote:

> This assurance/practice using email is essentially identical to the
> infamous dollar auth transaction, against VisaNet. If one can get an auth
> from VISA to allow the user a $1 credit, then you can infer the VISA number
> is accurate, and in good standing. It implies identity verification (and you
> can invoke fraud law against any law breakers).
>
> This it itself only a variant of a 100year old FBI trick, to induce someone
> under prosecution threat to commit formal mail fraud ... so one can get
> obtain leverage (incarceration, anal probing, association with the explicit
> violence of gangland present in holding cells etc) during a plea bargain
> over something much harder to prove.
>
>
> Attack surfaces tend to be multi-level (and that's a pun).
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: general-bounces at openid.net [mailto:general-bounces at openid.net] On
> Behalf Of Allen Tom
> Sent: Friday, October 17, 2008 8:35 PM
> To: Dick Hardt; OpenID List
> Subject: Re: [OpenID] Combining Google & Yahoo user experience research
>
> Dick Hardt wrote:
> >
> > The UX of getting a verified email and then auto binding an existing
> > account is cleaner. It does mean that if I can prove I have your email
> > address, that I can take over your account. Seems to broaden the
> > attack surface rather then narrow it.
> >
>
> Hi Dick,
>
> Many sites allow an account's password to be reset by sending a Reset
> Token to an email address associated with the account. An attacker who
> gains access to the email address is able to reset the password, and is
> therefore able to take over the account. If the ability to reset a
> password is equivalent to logging in, then the attack surface is really
> unchanged.
>
> Allen
>
>
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>



-- 
Chris Messina
Citizen-Participant &
 Open Technology Advocate-at-Large
factoryjoe.com # diso-project.org
citizenagency.com # vidoop.com
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