[OpenID] "Nightmare" article on OpenID

Fri Nov 19 14:08:36 UTC 2010

Very good suggestion, the local identifier/mutual registration point is one
that needs effort, I would be glad to talk about some approaches here from
the physical access control

Sal D’Agostino

@IDmachines

http://idmachines.blogspot.com 

From: openid-general-bounces at lists.openid.net
[mailto:openid-general-bounces at lists.openid.net] On Behalf Of Steven
Livingstone Pérez
Sent: Friday, November 19, 2010 3:31 AM
To: general at openid.net
Subject: Re: [OpenID] "Nightmare" article on OpenID

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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