An Analysis of User-Centric Identity Technology Trends, Openid\u27s First Act

Identity technologies within Internet applications have evolved at an aggressive pace over the past decade. As a result, a variety of user-centric identity management technologies are available on the Internet today. The user-centric identity technology realm has become a fragmented ecosystem of standards, techniques, and technical approaches to identity management. A symptom of this fragmentation is the sluggish adoption of user-centric identity technologies by Internet users. A study titled, An Analysis of User-Centric Identity Technology Trends, OpenID â„¢s First Act, aims to reveal identity technology adoption patterns of users that engage in the use of Internet applications secured by an authentication credential. The study specifically focuses on Internet applications currently offering, or having at some point in time offered OpenID 1.x/2.0 (denoted OpenID hereafter), also known as OpenID â„¢s First Act. An extensive history of OpenID, from its inception as an emerging technology, to its declining rate of adoption as a standard for Internet single-sign-on, will be presented. A goal of this critical analysis is to reveal the shortcomings of OpenID that led to the discontinuation of the technology by prominent Internet applications. In support of this critical analysis, a survey is conducted which gauges the awareness of OpenID among casual Internet users. The results from this survey will be compared with observed trends among Internet applications to determine the contributing factors to OpenID â„¢s decline on the Internet and the subsequent efforts to reinvent the technology

Identity in research infrastructure and scientific communication: Report from the 1st IRISC workshop, Helsinki Sep 12-13, 2011

Motivation for the IRISC workshop came from the observation that identity and digital identification are increasingly important factors in modern scientific research, especially with the now near-ubiquitous use of the Internet as a global medium for dissemination and debate of scientific knowledge and data, and as a platform for scientific collaborations and large-scale e-science activities.

The 1 1/2 day IRISC2011 workshop sought to explore a series of interrelated topics under two main themes: i) unambiguously identifying authors/creators & attributing their scholarly works, and ii) individual identification and access management in the context of identity federations. Specific aims of the workshop included:

• Raising overall awareness of key technical and non-technical challenges, opportunities and developments.
• Facilitating a dialogue, cross-pollination of ideas, collaboration and coordination between diverse – and largely unconnected – communities.
• Identifying & discussing existing/emerging technologies, best practices and requirements for researcher identification.

This report provides background information on key identification-related concepts & projects, describes workshop proceedings and summarizes key workshop findings

Developing front-end Web 2.0 technologies to access services, content and things in the future Internet

The future Internet is expected to be composed of a mesh of interoperable web services accessible from all over the web. This approach has not yet caught on since global user?service interaction is still an open issue. This paper states one vision with regard to next-generation front-end Web 2.0 technology that will enable integrated access to services, contents and things in the future Internet. In this paper, we illustrate how front-ends that wrap traditional services and resources can be tailored to the needs of end users, converting end users into prosumers (creators and consumers of service-based applications). To do this, we propose an architecture that end users without programming skills can use to create front-ends, consult catalogues of resources tailored to their needs, easily integrate and coordinate front-ends and create composite applications to orchestrate services in their back-end. The paper includes a case study illustrating that current user-centred web development tools are at a very early stage of evolution. We provide statistical data on how the proposed architecture improves these tools. This paper is based on research conducted by the Service Front End (SFE) Open Alliance initiative

The future of social is personal: the potential of the personal data store

This chapter argues that technical architectures that facilitate the longitudinal, decentralised and individual-centric personal collection and curation of data will be an important, but partial, response to the pressing problem of the autonomy of the data subject, and the asymmetry of power between the subject and large scale service providers/data consumers. Towards framing the scope and role of such Personal Data Stores (PDSes), the legalistic notion of personal data is examined, and it is argued that a more inclusive, intuitive notion expresses more accurately what individuals require in order to preserve their autonomy in a data-driven world of large aggregators. Six challenges towards realising the PDS vision are set out: the requirement to store data for long periods; the difficulties of managing data for individuals; the need to reconsider the regulatory basis for third-party access to data; the need to comply with international data handling standards; the need to integrate privacy-enhancing technologies; and the need to future-proof data gathering against the evolution of social norms. The open experimental PDS platform INDX is introduced and described, as a means of beginning to address at least some of these six challenges