March 23rd, 2007

An InfoCard selector for OS X and Linux

Posted by Phil Windley @ 2:38 pm

Categories: General, Microsoft, Novell, Security

Tags:

Dale Olds reports on his blog that Novell presented an Open Source Identity Selector (OSIS) on OS X and Linux that supports the same InfoCards as Windows CardSpace today at Brainshare. Pat Felsted has a screenshot of the OSIS. Dale describes a demo done by Baber (Novell product manager):

1. [He starts a] fully functional, native infocard selector running on the Mac.
2. He accessed a shopping site with an infocard generated from an OpenID account. Put some things in the cart and logged out.
3. [He switches] to a SUSE Linux Desktop machine. Fully functional InfoCard selector there as well. Accessed the same site with an OpenID InfoCard and sees stuff in his cart from the Mac session.
4. [He goes] to check out. The site asks for a card with different claims, needs a payment card.
5. The Higgins Infocard selector supports multiple card stores. In this case Baber selects a credit card from a card store on his mobile phone via Bluetooth.
6. He authorizes a (hypothetical) payment and the online shopping site (the relying party) only gets his shipping address and an authorization code from the credit card.

You can watch a video of the demo (about 40 minutes in) if you're interested. Its hard to imagine the number of technologies interacting to pull this off if you're not immersed in the details.

This is a big deal because it makes CardSpace that much more viable. What's more the OSIS supports OpenIDs as well, meaning that it's more functional than the current identity selector shipping with Vista. This demonstrates the vision of Kim Cameron of Microsoft in created an open system and the tenacity of the Bandit team and Higgins Project folks in making it all work.