martin.paljak.pri.ee.

I’ll be at Net-ID 2008 conference in March, talking about OpenID and Estonian eID infrastructure and how they come together in OpenID.ee.

2008 started with interesting events and great ideas: People are URLs too.

OpenID.ee uses the same idea – that people and URLs are the same things to some extent in certain situations. At least when URLs are used for matching identifiers for authentication purposes. In fact – if URLs are people then OpenID.ee provides permalinks for people. Cool URIs allow to address people, but OpenID.ee allows to address real people in the real world. And not only address – also to authenticate them.

Scott Kveton is definitely right – 2008 shall be very exciting!

Davidi ja minu ühine ettekanne OpenID, ID-kaardi ja privaatsuse teemadel (PDF, 5.8M) võeti kuulajate poolt hästi vastu. Minu osa algab 41. slaidiga ‘open.ID.ee’.

Interop ettekandes rääkis Hannes Astok samuti ID-kaardist ja mobiil-ID teemadel Baltic Rural Broadband Project raames. Uudse lähenemisena pakub see projekt Võrumaa asukohaks Kallaste ümbrust (kaart teisel leheküljel). Õnneks on Eesti ise õigesse kohta sattunud :)

EDIT: midagi läks vussi ja esialgne postitus sisaldas prahitähti üle loo. Nüüd on nii nagu peab.

Knock-knock! Who’s there? It’s me!

This works when you’re visiting your friends garage after you have called him beforehand. But we all know that internet doesn’t work this way.

OpenID is an open, decentralized, free framework for user-centric digital identity. (from openid.net)

If we omit “digital” from the equasion we see that OpenID should be user-centric identity or as Dick Hardt says: Identity (both 1.0 and 2.0) is about who you are.

So who are you?

Who am I? I can’t predict how you percieve your inner self but unless you suffer from “split personality” or have very certain beliefs about dualism the answer should be relatively easy – you are you (yes, the same You who was the person of the year). You are who you are. Period.

How this relates to OpenID? What is an OpenID? Simon Willison explains this in simple terms: OpenID is a URL. What means that the answer to the “Who?” question in OpenID world is a URL. A URL is better known as web address.

Address as an identity?

If we agree that OpenID is nothing but an address, we can compare it to traditional addresses people can easily understand. “Big City, Long Road 306″, “Smaller Village, 5th building from the left”, “New York, 5th Street 1234, 32nd floor, room #666″ etc. We all live somewhere (even if this “somewhere” is under a bridge), work somewhere and visit our friends who live somehere. All these places have addresses.

Wikipedia tells us that “Identity is about the sameness of two things”.

What if there is “Big City” in Italy and in Japan and they both have “Long Road 306″? Forget the readable address and take numbers – geographic coordinate system. You can unambiguously address a place on planet earth and all you need is a GPS to find the exact place. The mountain at a specific coordinate has existed before there was GPS or even before people understood that world is not flat.

The same way people have names. “John Smith” (or “Hannibal“), “Martin Paljak”, “Bill Gates”. Everybody you know has a name. Every “name address” leads to a human being who (hopefully) has a sense of “me” or a subject who could “practice” user-centric identity. As there are thousands of “John Smith”-s in the world, you can try to narrow it down to “John Smith, born on 13.07.67 in London”. I’m lucky (or unlucky?) in this case as I’m currently probably the only Martin Paljak on this planet. Our society (or governments) has invented an unambiguous adressing scheme for people as well – a database of social security numbers or personal ID codes. There is no other person in Estonia with a personal identity code 38207162722 even if his name would be Martin Paljak.

The same way you can’t assign coordinates to a mountain or issue coordinates (you can only invent the geographic coordinate system once) you can’t do that with other addresses – like OpenID URLs – they just exist in some system. You can escape your home address by going camping but you can’t escape the geographic coordinates of your tent. You can choose the place you live but you can’t choose the address the building has.

Internet is not real life

Everything I described before is about absolute identification what is actually the nice reality in real life. So you say that your online identity might be different from your real identity in the era of web2.0 and identity2.0?

This is the topic of the next post.

There are also philosophical issues in real life that need to be dealt with in practical ways. For example: Estonian personal identity code encodes the gender of the owner. Me as a male – my personal ID code starts with an odd number. If I would be female it would start with an even number.

What happens with people who undergo sex change operation? In real life and on the Internet ?

Finally I’d like to share with you two nice findings from the wild-wild-web:

Mart Parve talking about Estonian eID in a podcast and a funny video about Britons and how they fight their eID with humor (I DO understand the attitude towards government in UK. All those cameras and no real privacy there …)

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This is part of a series of posts that talk about my view on “Who? (you are)”, “How? (you prove it)” and “What? (can one do with this information)” of OpenID and electronic identity in general. The keywords of this post could be “absolute identification” and “federated identity” but in simple terms.

There have been lately some posts on the wild-wild-web about a service we’ve been preparing for public launch but there is one post I’d like to answer right now as it touches the delicate subject of security (or the urge to feel secured and safe).

I have promised a longer and more in-depth English post about the backround of the mentioned service before or right after the “gold v1.0 beta” release (what is happening really soon now, a matter of days I would say) – stay tuned for that.

Mark points out several real risks we must deal with. And yes – the golden rules for security related stuff would be “never say never” and “there is no mission impossible”. Even though my post does not give the answer to the original question about phishing nor discuss the generic functioning of smart cards or two factor authentication or identity issues I’d like to make some things clear in the context of open.id.ee solution and answer his concerns.

First: I’d like to make it absolutely clear that Estonia is not issuing OpenID-s as it is all about enabling existing technology and electronic identity rollouts to become OpenID compatible. This is mainly a question of ‘addressing’ or defining the semantics of the OpenID URL and how (if at all) do we encode the identity information into the OpenID URL. Very technical and very practical problem. You don’t issue addresses as they are just merely ‘pointers’ in programming parlance. You exist independently of any URLs possibly pointing at you. You can issue as many pointers as you like, as long as you understand the address and find it useful.

Second: The reason why this hybrid was created is not absolute security that is required by applications like electronic voting or electronic banking but to improve the overall security and privacy of the online identities of Estonians for the 99% rest of the websites in the wild wild web (and mainly abroad). Something practical. Somethig real. Right now, right here – not on the whiteboard.

Back to the list of things that could fail with open.id.ee:

A person could be threatened or bribed into activating their smart-card for someone else to use

You can never avoid the human factor. Threatened – yes (a hammer works best). Bribed? If you’re a complete moron selling your identity to someone – you could do it but what would the buyer get? By selling it you only hurt yourself (and the buyer could post on jyte a stupid claim under the sellers name). The idea is mainly to allow those who care to take better care of their online identity. If you don’t care and are willing to sell it – there is a problem secure OpenID can’t help you with. But what is very important: you can always reclaim your online identity (after you have been forced to part part from your eID card and PIN codes, thanks to either brute force or loads of gold) by applying for new eID ‘hardware’ (the old one is revoked and becomes useless).

The openid service itself could be hacked and thus faked

True. This is one of the biggest problems and this shall be dealt with special care by using a very secure environment and by open sourcing the service software. As this is a pure SSL service server certificates should help eliminate fakes.

The smart cards could be forged

Could. But very unlikely. If that would happen you should be much more worried about your Visa card than your online dog forum account. Be sure to check the pictures where I break into my eID card

Valid smart cards could be given to false identities either through forged documents or dishonest government employees

This is a more rare crime and way more serious and understood by police than a ‘my pet forum account was hijacked’. It is of course possible but here again the technical security of the given solution is secondary and human factor the primary threat.

Someone could figure out how to simulate a valid smart-card authentication

I would classify this under the generic security of smart cards. Again – this attack is possible – but very unlikely/difficult/expensive.

The openid server could have a bug that allowed for cross-site scripting attacks

True. This is what open source security is all about. You’ll eventually see the source code running the v1.0 service (and if there is a reasonable way to have signatures on the actual code running in the servers – you’ll have that too)

A phishing site might discover a way to capture a valid authentication and replay it later

What would make OpenID collapse. A lot of problems for everybody involved.

I’m all about security and healthy paranoia but in my humble opinion everyday security is mostly about common sense. Just like two terrorists would probably not use their national eID cards to secure and protect their communications, the security of the available technologies like smart cards is unbreakable for 99.999% of people and thus good enough for an even greater number of legitimate use cases.

And in the end it is all about trust. If I don’t trust somebody then there is nothing technology could change. Technology can only increase the level of trust as it shows that the other party is taking security seriously and is doing the best he could do. One has to figure out: Who do I have to trust? Why do I have to trust them? Who do I actually trust? Why do I trust them? Is the trust level good enough for the given situation?. Currently you have to trust evert site you register with to take care of your personal information rather than force the site to trust whatever YOU are willing to present as ‘this is something I trust. Use it!’…

The Estonian eID (or any national eID) is a nice reality check/example. One can say that you can’t really trust the government issuing it. But I believe it is OK in that case to use a piece of technology you do not trust to do business with a government you anyway don’t trust.

OpenID, just like electronic identity in the form of smart cards, makes stuff easier for you and more secure by design (hopefully). Take it or leave it. Use it and spend the time you save on doing something you love.