Windows CardSpace Team Bloggers

Brief video interview on TechEd Live New Zealand

Vibro.NET — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 22:08:41 GMT

Greetings from the far New Zealand :-) this is a great place, I wish I'd have more time to look around. I compensated by spending a stupid amount of money in souvenirs (all bought in about 20 mins, so without much judgement (if ever)). Yesterday I had my session on Cloud & Identity, and in few mins I'll have the one about Zermatt. While I wait to get to the podium, I'm typing this quick post to point you to a brief video interview I had with the excellent Mark Carroll: you can find it on the TechEd Live pages. Boy, I sure gesticulate a lot :-) you know how the old saying goes: if you want to reduce an Italian to silence, just tie his hands! (BTW: happy Labor Day for ev'body in the US) Read More......(read more)

Interview with Mark Russinovich on EDGE

Vibro.NET — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 04:44:10 GMT

Mark Russinovich had a nice chat with David; check it out here . I really appreciate the practice of annotating the video with the times at which certain topics are touched, that allows me to thumb through things like I'm used to do with text: HUGE time saver! Ryan was to kind to suggest me to check out the view of the bookshelf on frame at 40.6s, shown below: if you look on the right, between "Windows with C/C++" and the old-style MSDN Universal container, you'll spot a certain well known title :-) Read More......(read more)

PPID Compatibility Note for Sites Accepting Self-Issued Information Cards

Mike Jones: self-issued — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 21:54:04 GMT

Relying Parties often identify subjects using the Private Personal Identifier (PPID) claim and Signing Key values sent by an Information Card. Thus, it is important that the PPID and Signing Key values produced by a card be stable and long-lived. Unfortunately, the PPIDs and Signing Keys generated by self-issued (a.k.a. personal) Information Cards using the [...] Read More......(read more)

WS-Addressing Identity Extension Published

Mike Jones: self-issued — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 17:53:58 GMT

IBM and Microsoft just published the specification “Application Note: Web Services Addressing Endpoint References and Identity” at http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2006/02/addressingidentity/. This specification is referenced by the Identity Selector Interoperability Profile (ISIP) and is covered by Microsoft’s Open Specification Promise (OSP). This completes the publication and licensing under the OSP of all specifications that Information Cards [...] Read More......(read more)

Personal information can be a toxic liability…

Kim Cameron's Identity Weblog — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 19:00:06 GMT

When dealing with dangerous substances, let's protect ourselves from someone breaking a rule. Read More......(read more)

Visual Studio web project template for Zermatt... and your CardSpace RP ASP.NET web site is up&running in just 37.1 seconds

Vibro.NET — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 15:09:00 GMT

You would not believe how often I have to set up identity enabled web sites: for verifying a theory, for proving a point with colleagues, for demos and events... really really often. Vast majority of cases those are barely proofs of concept, nothing elaborated, so I've been working for reducing the overhead that every project entails. Needless to say, Zermatt has been a miracle balm for this: instead of cut&paste reuse, I finally have a tool with most of the capabilities I need few intellisense steps away. However my laziness knows no boundaries, so I came out with something that's even faster: a Visual Studio template for web sites, which sets up the few knobs that Zermatt needs directly at project creation time. Oh, don't expect anything fancy: this is basically the RP project I walked you through few posts ago . The only difference is that instead of adding references, creating pages, dragging controls and working with the web.config the template itself takes care of that. I am providing the template as attachment to this post : you can just drop the ZIP it in C:\Users\<your user>\Documents\Visual Studio 2008\Templates\ProjectTemplates\Visual Web Developer (or equivalent, if you use another disk/OS) and next time you'll create a new web site with Visual Studio you'll find it under "My Templates" as shown below. Now. ALL possible disclaimers apply for this template, the web site produced is just an example and lacks A LOT of key capabilities that should instead be...(read more)

Analysis of the Third OSIS User-Centric Identity Interop

Mike Jones: self-issued — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 16:06:45 GMT

Congratulations and thanks to Pamela Dingle for publishing a detailed analysis of what that the industry accomplished together during the Third OSIS User-Centric Identity Interop (I3). As Nulli Secundus writes about the paper: The OSIS I3 Interop was a five-month event in which organizations, individuals, and projects working in the solution spaces of Information Cards [...] Read More......(read more)

Windows CardSpace helps Eduserve to fuel DreamSpark authentication

Vibro.NET — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 07:17:58 GMT

I am sure you are all more than familiar with DreamSpark , the amazing (YES, amazing. Bravo Milo!) offer through which Microsoft gives access to developer & designer tools at no charge. That requires, naturally, to be able to prove that you are indeed a student. Eduserv is a not-for-profit UK-based organization that focuses on IT solutions for the education sector: their identity management solutions are used by over 4 millions of students from universities in UK & other countries. And here comes the interesting bit: Eduserv wrote an identity management component for DreamSpark integrated with their OpenAthens SP , and based on WCF & CardSpace :-) you can read about this on a recently published case study (word document here ). With all the identity talent that runs abundant in the Microsoft offices in UK (Paul MacKinnon & Planky, congrats!) it is not really a surprise to see that they are ahead of the curve, but it is most definitely a pleasure :-) congratulations to all the people involved! Read More......(read more)

New Issue of the Architecture Journal: Article on "Claims and Identity, On-Premise and Cloud Solutions"

Vibro.NET — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 17:17:26 GMT

The latest issue of the Architecture Journal is available for download here (I am breaking the news even before the rest of the pages are updated from issue 15 to issue16: see how much I care about you?;-)). What makes this especially interesting is that issue 16 is entirely dedicated to identity! I have to admit that I've yet to read most of the articles, but I've definitely went through 2 of them: One is an interview/profile with Kim Cameron. It's a nice read, and I am sure you'll enjoy to know more about Kim The other is an article from yours truly, titled "Claims and Identity, On-Premise and Cloud Solutions". It expands on this post , and rolls in various others Writing for the Architecture Journal is a big honor, as you can see from the list of high profile former contributors, and I am very grateful to Diego for having my article in this issue. Thanks man! And thanks also to Gianpaolo , with whom I had many deep discussions that helped me to keep the abstraction tangents to what i hope is an acceptable level :-) As usual, if you have feedback feel free to send it my way Read More......(read more)

Setting up a basic CardSpace RP ASP.NET website... using Zermatt

Vibro.NET — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 19:57:00 GMT

With few weeks of delay I finally forced in my schedule the conclusion of my little getting started series "... using Zermatt" (links to former episodes: setting up an STS for smartcard-backed managed cards & issuing smartcard-backed managed cards ). The first posts I wrote about Zermatt were all about producing identity info: today we'll take a look at consuming those info, something that will be done a lot more (there are only few mints, but an ocean of ways to spend the money they produce) and, fortunately, is also a dramatically simpler programming task. Before we go any further: Please. Read. Keith's. White paper . This series of posts is a quick & dirty guide, designed to get you started and to be easily found via search engines when you need a quick lookup: Keith's article is exhaustive & well polished, hence (together with the product documentation) should be your main reference. I am Vittorio Bertocci and I approve of this message (if you don't live in the US, nevermind :-)). Aaaaalllrighty, back to business. Thanks to the 2 former posts, we have an active STS and its associated managed card. Now we want to write a website which uses that STS for acquiring some info about our users in form of claims. Here the highest order bit is not the security paraphernalia we need to be familiar with when we work at the STS level: when designing an RP, the application biz requirements should be king. Taking that in mind, let's wear our web site dev hat and work backward...(read more)

The Laws of Identity

Kim Cameron's Identity Weblog — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 15:24:44 GMT

Short version Read More......(read more)

Kim Cameron's Identity Weblog — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 02:32:39 GMT

Let's avoid the word "credential". It has so many meanings as to be confusing Read More......(read more)

Crypto flaw + bad practices = need for governance

Kim Cameron's Identity Weblog — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 20:09:52 GMT

Timely patching of one's operating system needs to be one of the host of requirements placed on any identity provider Read More......(read more)

New York Times on OpenID and Information Cards

Kim Cameron's Identity Weblog — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 23:08:06 GMT

Passwords seem perfectly natural "because we’ve been trained to repeat them so much" Read More......(read more)

Identity Selector Interoperability Profile V1.5

Mike Jones: self-issued — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 21:21:59 GMT

I am pleased to announce the publication of the Identity Selector Interoperability Profile V1.5 and companion guides. The ISIP (as it’s come to be called) documents the protocols and data formats used by Windows CardSpace so as to enable others to build compatible Information Card software. Version 1.0 of these documents corresponded to the.NET Framework [...] Read More......(read more)