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October 09, 2002
Jamie Lewis of the Burton Group on Provisioning
Jamie Lewis, CEO of the Burton Group gave a very detailed talk on identity infrastructures. I wish I had access to an online copy of the slides because they've got a lot of information in them. One of the things he talked about was provisioning and the security issues surrounding it. Simplified, the issue comes down to, at least for employee provisioning, making sure that authorizations are tied to roles so that as employees move from job to job within the organization or leave the organization, the access rights that they had before terminate when their role does. Think of all the information that people still have access to, weeks, months, and years after they leave their job because no one turned off access. Its one thing to have a policy. Its another thing to have an architecture that supports the policy and makes it possible. The Utah Master Directory gets us one step closer to being able to support access control though architecture, but there is much left to do.
On a related note, Jamie pointed me to a speech by Dan Geer, CTO of @stake on identity where Geer says:
Tacking authorizations onto the assertion of identity is nevertheless a commonplace necessity, but there is an odd "gotcha" there, viz., the irreducible vulnerability of any system to Denial of Service (DOS) attacks is proportional to the amount of labor that system must expend before it can make its authorization decision. Ever more fine grained authorization decisions tend to be more complex, and the denier of service can call upon you to do them over and over. In that sense, authentication decisions, being as they are permanently simpler than authorization decisions, have a durable design advantage.
This leads to the issue of scaling where Geer says:
If the access control matrix eventually scales out of reach. What then? I submit that where the geometric scaling of access control will kill it in the end, accountability stands ready. This is not to say that I like pervasive, universal accountability, per se, but the only reason a free society works is that you can pretty much do anything though if you screw up badly we will find you and make you pay. Accountability is like that, i.e., it is a log processing problem.
Geer's entire talk is worth reading. It asks the question of how much time and effort we want to spend authorizing behavior (say of citizens on the utah.gov website) vs. how much effort we should be into policing that behavior and removing rights when the behavior doesn't meet acceptable standards. Our society does not try to authenticate people and then authorize them to perform certain bahaviors by default, the overhead would be too high. How does that inform our web site policies?
03:37 PM | Recommend This | Print This
Shiboleth
I went to a panel discussion moderated by Doc Searls on open source issues and identity. The part I was most interested in was Ken Klingenstein's talk about Shiboleth. Shiboleth is an interesting word what was used to distinguish the Ephraimites from the Gileadites. The Ephraimites, not being able to pronounce sh, called the word sibboleth. (See -- Judges 12:4). From the introduction:
Shibboleth is an initiative to develop an open, standards-based solution to the needs for organizations to exchange information about their users in a secure, and privacy-preserving manner. The initiative is facilitated by Internet2 and a group of leading campus middleware architects from member schools and corporate partners. The organizations that may want to exchange information include higher education, their partners, digital content providers, government agencies, etc.
Shiboleth, as I understand it, is open-source, enterprise middleware that manages authorization for users other enterprise services. Sounds similar to SiteMinder. I wonder how it compares.
03:18 PM | Recommend This | Print This
Cluetrain Lunch
I had lunch with three of the four authors of the Cluetrain Manifesto. I'd met Doc Searls before, but not David Weinberger or Chris Locke. The Palladium d00d from Microsoft was there as well (didn't catch his name), so the conversation revolved around digital rights management to some extent. I've read the book (Cluetrain) and while I can't say I agree with everything thats in it, I found it thought provoking and would recommend it to anyone who wants to understand how connectedness changes business. At some point, I think it would be interesting to research the same question with respect to government.
01:35 PM | Recommend This | Print This
My Talk at Digital ID World
I spoke this morning. I posted my thoughts on this talk earlier. Here's what I actually said. I shared the stage with David Temoshok from the GSA. David is their expert on eAuthentication. I went through many of the ways that state governments interact with identity, my primary point was that state governments are, for better or worse, going to have something to say about identity in the digital world and that the digital ID community needs to engage with state legislatures to inform, educate, and guide that discussion.
01:16 PM | Recommend This | Print This
GM CTO on Identity
Tony Scott, the CTO of General Motors, is talking about digital identity at GM. The interesting thing to me is how similar his problem was to the problem we face in Utah today: multiple fragmented systems controlled by dozens of relatiely independent organizations with multiple identity representations for any given customer. They've solved the problem over the last few years.
I like that this has enabled me to take my Silverado Pickup to multiple dealerships and have the history of the vehicle maintenance available. This has to be more efficient for GM and should result in better maintenance for my vehicles.
Something that I think is lost on many is how this change enabled GM's OnStar service. OnStar puts a vehicle on the net. In my opinion, there's a dark side to this. I'm not all that excited about having a tracking device that rats on me installed in my vehicle. Seems that its got a lot of upside for GM and limited upside for me (at least with my lifestyle--I don't frequently get a flat tire, lock myself out of my car or forget to change my oil). I wonder if you can program OnStar to not tell GM information about your car?
Digital ID brings to the front exactly these kinds of conflicts between benefit and loss of privacy. We fight the same issues with on-line government services.
09:52 AM | Recommend This | Print This
Public Domain Information
Phil Becker in the opening session just said: "universal networking drives information towards the public domain." This resonates with something Ray Ozzie said yesterday: "what if all email was public?" Governments deal with this issue more than other organizations because there is an expectation that government information is public domain by default and private only in specific circumstances. Powerful forces fight at the interface of these two domains. I do know that having all email public would make most people uncomfortable. I don't know that anyone has studied the effect of networks on the public nature of government. Sounds like a good masters thesis for a technically inclined political scientist.
09:13 AM | Recommend This | Print This
Digital ID World
I'm at the Denver Tech Center attending Digital ID World. I'm speaking this morning on digital identity issues in state government. I'll post the slides from my talk after I'm done (since I won't be sure what's in the talk until then). I'll be blogging the conference as I can. The complete set of posts will be in my ID, Privacy, and Security category.
Coincidentally, Dave McNamee blogs about his work on our authentication projects today.