[OpenID] XRD signing and a new kind of Claimed Identifier

[George Fletcher]

Assuming I understood correctly...

The initial privacy question that comes to mind with this is whether the 
public key will become it's own globally correlatable identifier. This 
doesn't really matter for OpenIDs where the user enters a "claimed 
identifier". But for the "directed identity" flow, if the XRD associated 
with the returned "opaque" identifier contains the same public key as 
the user's XRD for their "global/know" "claimed identifier", then the 
public key has enabled correlation across identifiers that weren't 
supposed to be correlatable.

Now, if each opaque "direct identity" identifier has it's own public 
key, we're fine from a privacy perspective, but this is rather ugly to 
deploy.

Thanks,
George

Andrew Arnott wrote:
> I haven't read the XRD spec draft, so I don't know how well this would 
> fit in, but I wonder...
>
> Could we put a public key in an XRD file, and have the authentication 
> process be that the OP proves it has the private key, and then the 
> public key is the claimed identifier?  If we could pull this off we'd 
> totally solve the problem of being able to change the URI or XRI 
> identifier while still maintaining the user account at each RP; and 
> similarly we could abandon a URL without fear of someone else picking 
> it up and stealing the old user's identity.
>
> Basically, have many of the same benefits of XRIs today, except 
> without the annual fee of owning a top-level i-name, and without being 
> locked down to one XRI service.  For example I have a few i-names, 
> each with their own i-number, but these numbers aren't really 
> portable.  AFAIK I can't abandon all my i-names, then acquire all new 
> i-names with different services and different numbers of * characters 
> in them, and then hook up my old i-numbers and expect it all to work.
>
> Is this way off base, or a possibility?
>
> --
> Andrew Arnott
> "I [may] not agree with what you have to say, but I'll defend to the 
> death your right to say it." - S. G. Tallentyre
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