September 21st 2008
Will Norris is working on a revision to OpenID for WordPress. This is good, and I have some observations and suggestions. At the moment the OpenID plugin works pretty well - I have separate logins delegated through domains I own. I routinely log in through OpenID for both routine and administrative activities. Continue Reading »
September 18th 2008
These are design patterns in the Christopher Alexander sense rather than the object oriented design sense: they address the physical and network environment rather than focusing on software abstractions. The patterns were introduced in my book Authentication.
There are four patterns: local, direct, indirect, and off-line.
September 1st 2008
It used to be that the default password was your mother’s maiden name, your SSN, your birthdate, or something like that. Now you have to pick a password, and your ‘password recovery’ questions are based on those old stand-by questions. So you can still break in to a person’s accounts by answering those classic questions.
This problem will only disappear over time, as people learn how NOT to lose security credentials. Continue Reading »
August 17th 2008
Thanks to Gary Krall, tech director of PIP at Verisign, I have a recipe for “works every time” OpenID delegation with their free PIP service. First, what is OpenID delegation?
Delegation lets you use your very own URL as your identity URL for logging in with OpenID. For example, I can use http://www.cryptosmith.com/ to log in to web sites. To do this, you have to provide some special statements (a.k.a. magic) in your HTTP files that redirects the OpenID process from your web site to the service that actually does your OpenID authentication.