[OpenID] "Nightmare" article on OpenID

Fri Nov 19 08:31:09 UTC 2010

I think most of that article was about issues in not properly developing a web application to use there's technologies rather than issues with the technologies (though I'd acknowledge things could be improved... though they haven't stopped me).

Perhaps it would be useful to have stater/primer architecture patterns and coding practices for working with OpenID in the real world. Everything from how to sport OP downtime to local identifiers.

Steven
http://livz.org

Date: Fri, 19 Nov 2010 00:22:54 -0800
From: sknvn-openid at yahoo.com
To: general at openid.net
Subject: Re: [OpenID] "Nightmare" article on OpenID

Another very important point he raised is about the uptime. He was very happy with RPX until it went down a few times. 
Essentially any time an OP has a downtime, RP is going to be down. Since there is no contract between RP and OP there is no SLA. The other issue is that different OPs will have very different uptime. So there is almost no way for an RP to deal with hundreds of OPs and one or the other may be down at any given time. A user may select an OP that is very unreliable and not be able to login to RP site.
Banks often have maintenance in the night and they may be down (as that is normal for them) every few days.

I don't see any easy solution to this as you are outsourcing your authentication. The other issue related to this and that rarely gets much attention is about the
 account recovery. If somehow user is unable to recover his account at OP, there has to be a way for any RP to allow them to recover their account at RP site. This is a must if a user has paid for a service.

Thanks

Naveen

From: Johannes Ernst <jernst+openid.net at netmesh.us>
To: List OpenID <general at openid.net>
Sent: Thu, November 18, 2010 9:19:57 PM
Subject: Re: [OpenID] "Nightmare" article on OpenID

On Nov 18, 2010, at 16:11, Allen Tom wrote:The author raises many important issues for consumer oriented websites that are trying to accept 3rd party logins, and I think we as a community should listen and take the author's feedback very seriously.
I strongly agree with Allen.
Even if the author was all wrong (he isn't -- I've run into some of the same issues) it clearly indicates that there is a lot of work to be done, at the very minimum documenting everything so well that few people can get it wrong. Nothing is a faster way into irrelevance than claiming the customer is wrong.
Specially:
1) Directed Identity / PPID (Pairwise Pseudonmous identifier) /  non-correlatible RP specific identifier - is great in theory, but does not provide enough value to
 most RPs to justify implementing OpenID.
Some people may remember me arguing "what about customer service" so many years back. If I can't tell my identifier to the customer service guy on the phone, how is it ever going to work? Amusingly, this article refers exactly to that use case
 PPID identifiers have no history, no data, and no reputation - why would any RP want this? Also, as the author pointed out, changing the PPID based on the realm/return_to means that RPs will "lose all their users" if they ever switch their domain/realm. There are many valid reasons why RPs would want to have multiple realms/domains, or to change them around.

2) username at provider identifiers are necessary for users to contact the RP via customer support and other out of band mechanisms. For all practical purposes, the email address is really required.
If the user remembers their e-mail address but not anything else (like URL), that's a tautology.

3) We often talk about OpenID's value to end users, but we don't talk enough about giving value to RPs. The main hurdle to OpenID adoption is that RPs don't see enough value in OpenID, especially relative to other proprietary alternatives. 

For a really harsh critique of OpenID, I highly recommend reading Yishan Wong's (ex Facebook/Paypal) tirade against OpenID on Quora:
http://www.quora.com/What-s-wrong-with-OpenID

Allen

On Wed, Nov 17, 2010 at 4:01 PM, Bill Shupp <hostmaster at shupp.org> wrote:

http://blog.wekeroad.com/thoughts/open-id-is-a-party-that-happened

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