March 7th, 2006
SXIP 2.0 refined user-centric identity infrastructures
SXIP has a has a big sponsorship presence at ETech, the badge lanyards and even the room keys bear the SXIP logo. I really wish the key cards had said "SXIP into Your Room." Of course, the hotel room system isn’t using SXIP, but it’s a good tie-in in any event.
This morning SXIP CEO Dick Hardt is doing a sequel to his Identity 2.0 talk from OSCON, made famous by his style and humor. This morning’s talk is titled “Who’s the Dick on My Site?” The content was new, but the message was very much the same and the presentation is more tutorial in nature.
The culmination of the talk was the announcement of SXIP 2.0. Version 2 has some substantive improvements over version 1. Like version 1, there’s no need to add anything to the browser for SXIP 2.0 to work, but there’s an optional plugin for Firefox that adds good functionality for logging into SXIP enabled Web sites.
Another interesting feature is relying party notification. When data changes, the homesite (the SXIP term for the identity provider) remembers what relying parties have been sent that data in the past and give the user the option of sending an update notification to those relying parties.
Another new feature called authoritative sites gives the user the ability to put credentials from the authoritative site on their homesite and later transfer those credentials to the relying party. Interesting way to hide the use of PKI behind a layer of software.
SXIP is one of the leaders in the user-centric identity space and Dick has been one of it’s most high profile and vocal proponents. Dick’s also been active in the larger discussion about digital identity. SXIP 2.0 shows that listening to the feedback of your users and the larger community can improve your product in significant ways.
Phil Windley is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Brigham Young University. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
