May 3rd, 2006
The many players at IIW
The Internet Identity Workshop (also talked about here) has been going on for the past few days. The workshop is centered on "user-centric identity," which is confusing enough to be sure, but when you throw in the various protocols, systems and groups working in it — well, things get downright disorienting.
As such, I thought a quick run-down of the pieces of this puzzle might be in order (please note: this is not meant to be all-inclusive):
SAML: The "Security Assertion Markup Language" is the OASIS standard that is at the heart of most "federated identity" projects you hear about today.
The Liberty Alliance: Started in response to Microsoft’s Passport, Liberty has grown to be an organization that has released multiple protocols for various identity functionalities (from SSO to discovery services).
The Identity Metasystem: An idea proposed by Kim Cameron, the Identity Metasystem is meant to be an overarching system that creates interoperability between all other identity protocols, standards and systems (at least, in theory). The mechanism proposed for doing this is WS-Trust.
InfoCards: Microsoft’s implementation of an identity "selector" mechanism that is built to work within the parameters of the Identity Metasystem.
SXIP: The "Simple Extensible Identity Protocol" that was started by Sxip Identity. Sxip (the company) has also gone on to work on "DIX" - the IETF version of SXIP (the protocol’s) architecture.
LID: "Lightweight Identity" - LID for short is a URL-based identity schema written by Johannes Ernst of Netmesh.
OpenID: Another URL-based identity system, OpenID is done in association with LiveJournal.
i-names: an identity mechanism based upon the XRI and XDI specifications from OASIS.
YADIS: "Yet Another Distributed Identity System" is a discovery service that facilitates interoperability between LID, OpenID and i-names.
Higgins: The recently announced "trust framework" for identity that lives inside of the Eclipse project, Higgins is backed by IBM and Novell, and seeks to provide developer level tools for identity functions. Many expect Higgins to provide interoperable "identity meta-system" tools over time.
That’s the major stuff, and yes, I’ve left a bunch out. However, knowing the above will at least give you a footing for understanding the work and discussions taking place at the Internet Identity Workshop.
