Higgins dev call –
March 5,
2009
Attendees
* Brian
Carroll - Serena
*
Andy Hodgkinson - Novell
*
Mike McIntosh - IBM
*
Drummond
Reed
- Cordance
*
Mary
Ruddy
- Meristic
* Markus
Sabedello - Parity
* Paul
Trevithick
- Parity
*
Brian
Walker
- Parity
* Tom
Carroll
- Parity
*
Hank Mauldin - Cisco
*
John
Bradley
* Anubhav Sharma -
Ospera
* Brian
Carroll - Serena
*
Andy Hodgkinson - Novell
*
Drummond
Reed
– Cordance
Logistics
Time: noon EST
Dial-in:
1-866-362-7064 /
892048#
Agenda
1. [Brian] 1.1M6 - targeted for March 6
- See [1]
- [Brian] Status on M6: had targeted for this Friday. I propose we push that out one more
week to March 13th. Talked to
Oracle [Mohamad]. He has IdAS Google CP item, the only major candidate. He’s
hopping to have this finished by then. I took all the other high priority
candidates to M7 and updated the wiki page accordingly. The M7 target date is
April 24th for the
WS-Trust , SOAP and IdAS registry items
that Greg was working on. Any question or comments? I can send an email out to
the Higgins-dev
list.
2. [Brian, Alexander,
Andy] Selector Architecture Harmonization
- See [2]
- [BrianW] Andy is on the
call, and I’ll let him talk to the client side about all his great work. The
main focus is now to prepare for the FC2 meeting next week in
Paris. They have been working
on taking the latest version of the Cocoa client working against
the backend services that Alex has developed to demo on a Mac machine. Had
meeting yesterday and sent out high level summary.
- [Andy] I have the basic
operations, add, delete, modify and retrieve working. It is also working in
the GTK client also, though
there are some minor performance issues. Have the cocoa more complete now than
the GTK Sent version out to Paul and Markus
yesterday. Feedback is that it is working and will at least have something to
demo. Meantime, we’re going to address performance issues from multiple
backend trips to the server.
- [Markus] I tried it
today, and it all works. I was
able to access my account and use my cards, so that is good. But it is just
working for p-cards now.
- [Andy] I think Alex is
working on that. It will accept and store m-cards, just need to get it to
return them.
- [Brian]
Yes.
3. [Markus]
Should IdAS authentication materials be just a Java Object?
- Would it make sense to
- Define an identifier
for every common type of authn materials.
- Have an IAuthnMaterials
interface that defines method for (de-) serializing authn
materials?
- OTIS REST [3] has solved
both problems by inventing its own authn material identifiers and
serialization structures.
- Responses from Jim
- [Markus] Haven’t made too much progress on that
on my end since last week. The
idea is to do two things … and find some way to serialize and de-serialize
them so can store than and send them over the wire. We could introduce an interface of authentication materials.
There has been some feedback from Jim on that issue. Jim said that he agrees
with the first idea. So I will
try to start a list, make a first proposal, and then on the second issue, I
think Jim’s opinion was that it would make sense. I will also make a proposal.
- [Hank] Not really clear
on all of this, so when you write up the proposal can you write up the
benefits as part of the proposal?
- [Markus] The main benefit
it to make it possible for someone one who wants to open an IdAS context to
know what kind of authentication is needed. Today, there is no way to learn
this programmatically, so you need to know it before hand. If we had this we
could do that and open contexts dynamically without knowing anything about
them in advance.
4. [Anubhav]
Eclipse Swordfish [9] and SOPERA [10]
- SOPERA 3.2 is using the
Higgins STS.
- Has implemented renew
functionality in the Higgins STS via an extension.
- Swordfish can be used as
a SOA runtime; can deliver a swordfish binding for
Higgins
STS.
- Offering to donate this
to Higgins.
- [Mary] We have as special
guest this week [Anubhav] who has been using the Higgins
STS and extending it. He is releasing a commercial product
SOPERA 3.2 that is using the STS, and is also involved
with the Eclipse Swordfish project.
- [Anubhav] I’m Anubhav
Sharma from Ospera in Germany. Will give you a brief
background. We have a product based on SOA and we have a suite of products and
infrastructure services and security services and toolings. With the latest
version, we have already released
3.2, we have integrated the Higgins
STS. We looked for open source and found
Higgins and were very
successful. It was useful to use
WS-Trust and Higgins. We had to extend
Higgins to support existing
production functionality. We had to use extension points to have integration
with enterprise hosts.
- [Anubhav] Want to work
closely and share ideas.
- [Anubhav] We also have an
Eclipse project called Swordfish, and we are already headed to general
release. For Galileo release can’t use STS, but in the future,
really want to use it.
- [Anubhav] We want to
contribute back the extension we have already done. Swordfish could also use this. I propose delivering a Swordfish
binding for the STS. That is the basic idea,
why I’m contributing in this con–call.
- [Mary] Thank you. To
propose a contribution to Higgins, the next step is to
enter a bugzilla item with the code in an attachment and send it to the
list.
- [Mike] You should enter a
bugzilla item with an attachment.
- [Mary] Yes, that would be
great.
- [Anubhav] Yes, I will do
that…
- [Anubhav] Also will be providing a Swordfish binding. Not sure how it
fits. Would help for
integration.
- [Mary] Enter a bugzilla item for that
also.
- [Anubhav] It is a
proposal. We have a Swordfish binding to connect to the
Higgins
STS. It is not yet done. Not looking for
any announcement.
- [Mike] Can you tell us a little more
about Swordfish? Is it an
alternative to??
- [Anubhav] Are providing an environment in OSGi. We have integrated Apache. Now
providing support for Jaxvx Interface. These are all OSGi components that can
be deployed directly into Equinox.
- [Mike] Ok.
- [Anubhav] I will do a bugzilla item and wait for comments
and decision. I ‘m going at a high level [on this call]. To go into detail is
a lot.
- [Mary] Looking at the code will help us to get
up to speed.
- [Mary] Thanks for joining our call
today.
- [Anubhav]
Thanks.
5. [Paul] Password
Cards
- [4] Discusses how I-Cards
in an enhanced client (i.e. enhancements to the Higgins Browser Extension as
well as to the Selector) can be used to login to unmodified un/pw-accepting
websites.
- There are three design
options [6] for how the card metaphor is applied. Some of the tradeoffs
between them are listed [7].
- Paul’s blog post
[5].
- [Paul] Wanted to let people know about his
interesting idea. How can we take advantage of the metaphor of a selector and card. I took the opportunity to create this
wiki page. There are a lot of people interested. The biggest most interesting
question is there are three metaphor design options. The question is how do
those username and password pairs relate to cards? There are three ways we
could do it.
- [Paul] From the wiki
page: 1) every un/pw is on its own card.
There is only one pair on each card. If a user had their account at
Amazon they would have their card.
- [Paul]Another step is to
collapse all the accounts at Amazon (buying book for work vs. home). What if we collapsed them per
site. Going still further “per
role”. It has been suggested that a person may
have as few as one un/pw card, if they have only one persona and don’t have
multiple accounts on any website. If they did have more than one account on
a particular website, maybe If I
have a card for personal use and a card for work use, or if a mom is sharing a
computer with two kids they may each have their own card. Typically you would
only have a few, 1-3, role cards.
So it has the benefit of a smaller number of cards. I’m interested in gathering feedback.
It need to be fleshed out further.
- [Mike] It seems like one
thing to argue about password cards are personal cards. The alternative is if the p-card
contains the set of un/pw you then have a problem if you were to synchronize
your card store between two boxes. You’d have to recognize the card type any
time any password changes….
- [Paul] First of all , I
wrote up only about personal pw cards but you are absolutely correct there
could be managed password card We
at Parity have already implemented that before. Your issue of re-syncing is
more of a problem with the per roles approach. But that is a really good
point. I will add to the pros and
cons…
- [Mike] The problem is
that the per account and per site model had the potential to generate way too
many cards. Managing that whole
giant list will be difficult.
- [Paul] That is a common
point that is made. It is true that there would be a lot of cards. You would
have to put extra UI in to manage lots of cards. You would only see 1-3 cards
in a selector. Only time see lots of card is in the card manager view. We
believe that can be handled in the UI.
Microsoft’s design center is that a person has only a very few cards,
and so their UI only handles a few cards.
- [Mike]
IBM [employee] example: It
seems wasteful to create an extra card for every one of those websites I would
go to internally at IBM (as they would reuse the
same authentication.]
- [Paul] That is a
disadvantage of the per-site approach.
- [Brian] Is there any
other scenario where a card could have multiple passwords on
it.....?
- [Mike] The problem is
passwords expire at different times on different systems. The other problem is
that if we encourage that it is encouraging not the best
process.
- [Brian] Though in that
case hopefully the password is better.
- [Mike] When we get back a
message about a password expiring, it would be awesome if we could somehow
generate a strong password that conforms to the password policy, that the user
never has to type in. We can
generate different one for every site.
- [Paul] Mike you are
right. I‘ve been saying that for three years.
- [Hank] Great. You are
talking about a pw manager plug-in that is available on most operating
systems. On Mac iPassword stores
all your un/pw’s. For an OS you could have a pw managed card that has that
function as a single card that uses that metaphor.
- [Mike] I think you could have a card for each
role
- [Hank] Could separate between business and
personal.
- [Mike] You are really talking about something
people do. IBM acquired Accentuate. It
screen scrapes and stores un/pw for every site. To me the benefit here is the
consistent user experience regardless of the underlying protocol.
- [Paul] Amen to that.
- [Hank] If you have this card manager, vs. the
idea of having 100’s of potential cards, it seems different. That almost
becomes a different management issue. I like the idea of having fewer cards. I
think what you are describing is already available. So it seems to me we would
take the best of this and combine it with the UI of having a card.
- [Paul] That was a great discussion. I sense a leaning towards the idea of
the per role card we came up
with. I proposed it based on our
work with r-card., but I’m not sure that is a good approach.
- [John] Hopefully by the time we have a r-card
with Amazon, they will also take it for login.
- [Paul] It may be two different cards. Maybe it
is ok or good to separate that which gets you in the door from your persona
inside the room.
- [John]. If Amazon took the Equifax card, that is
fine, but it only has a few fields about you. For the r-card with Amazon, I largely provide the
fields. Maybe that is fine.
- [Hank] I don’t think that is a problem. When the
user goes to the site, both cards come up. The user could choose either one. The
issue.. .
- [John] It is likely only one card would come
up.
- [Drummond] Agree..
- ……
- [Paul] Maybe it is not good to extend the r-card
per site thing to how they get in.
- [Drummond] There seems to be a natural
progression. Password cards are for site that just take passwords and aren’t
information card enabled yet. The kind that is on a personal card. If they are
issuing a relationship card, that is what they would ask for and what would
pop up in the selector.
- [Paul] That is a great point.
- [Paul] Can I just take a straw poll? Is there anyone who thinks the per
site and per account per site is the best way to go?
- [Tom] One thing I would say about the other
option is it requires a different UI and ceremony for the user. If I have two
cards associated with two accounts on a …
- [Paul] No, you would just use a card and the
system would accept it.
- [Paul] You have two accounts and if you have
problem factoring your life into a card, two cards will pop up. The other
possibility is you haven’t factored your life and have two accounts, one
account per card.
- [John] Problem can’t put two accounts on one
site.
- ………
- [Drummond] I’m finding myself moving from the
per site to the per role camp… There is only one question have to ask the
user. Should be fairly quick process of reviewing the role list.. For each
site that has more than one account they will assign them..
- [Paul] Not only is that not too much trouble,
reviewing the list is also an opportunity to identify the ones that are
wrong…
- [Paul] I also started off in the per account
camp and migrated to the per site and now I’m in the per role camp. [reference
to Brian’s comment.]
- [John] Per role is more UI work but makes it
easier…
- [Drummond] If have one, then done. If have two,
just choose a role and go.
- [John] Independent of which choices we make, we
still have the fundamental security problem of how to secure between the
selector and browser plugin.
- [Paul] That problem has to be solved anyway. It
is somewhat orthogonal to this.
- [John] This was a problem that no one could take
advantage of.
- …
- [John] It only really applies to no SSL RP’s.
Once we have the ability to give out passwords for individual sites, Today, the most people are exposed to
any plugin,.. It is at least a separate process. So that there is some friction there.
The integrated one, where the selector is part of the plugin…..
- [Mike] Even if you assume that you are not
going to give away info in the card, if you can hijack the browser, in a
session that has been established correctly, what is the difference? If I can install a browser plug-in and
you use that browser to access your bank account and you go in and select a
card, the mean time, the token you used to access your bank account is sitting
in your selector. You can just relay the token….
- [Paul] If someone is willing to install a rogue
browser plug-in, there is nothing we can do, unless we can lock down the
browser and selector there is very little we can do. We can make it convenient
to be as secure as we are now. I hope that this leads to passwords going
away.
- [Mike] I agree once people use cards, bumping
them up to something more secure will be easy to do.
- [Paul] We have one more item on the agenda.
- [Mary] It is proposed changed to the
Higgins website left-hand
navigation.
6. [Paul]
Higgins website nav
change
- See [8] for proposal
- In a way it’s really just
following through on the “3 doors” structure that we’ve implemented on the
home page.
- [Paul] …I feel like that is working. And I propose that
we apply it consistently throughout our navigation structure and flatten out
solutions. Solution is a duplicate of info in doors one, two and three. They
are in conflict. I propose we get rid of the concept of solution.
- [Paul] I’m willing to do all the work, I want to
make sure that it all make sense.
- [John] Would you carry this over into the
components? I don’t think this will make it any worse that it is.
- [Paul] Components are just building blocks
and can be used cross solutions so need to keep that
separate.
- [Hank] If we change the solutions, it will
change how we link in the components anyway.
- [Paul] We have space on the left. Does anyone
object?
- [Hank] I don’t see any problem.
- [Paul] The problem is that we have two places
that describe solutions: one is PHP and one is wiki. This makes it simpler and
avoids duplications.
- [Hank] I think that works. We would want to keep
the information on third parity products that use
Higgins.
- [Mary] We could move that up into the
higher level link.
- [Hank] It could have its own navigation
thing.
- [Hank] Maybe it could be elevated.
- [Mary] Exactly.
- [Paul] Ok, good. We are out of
time.
[1] http://wiki.eclipse.org/Higgins_1.1M6
[2]
http://wiki.eclipse.org/Selector_Architecture_Harmonization
[3]
http://code.bandit-project.org/trac/wiki/OTIS/Doc/Task/Authenticate/AuthenticateUser
[4]
http://wiki.eclipse.org/Password_Cards
[5]
http://www.incontextblog.com/?p=177
[6]
http://wiki.eclipse.org/Password_Cards#Metaphor_Design_Options
[7]
http://wiki.eclipse.org/Password_Cards#Metaphor_Design_Option_TRADEOFFS
[8]
http://wiki.eclipse.org/Website_Backlog#Flatten_Solutions_into_the_3_solutions_areas_.28nav_structure_change.29
[9]
http://www.eclipse.org/swordfish/
[10]
http://www.sopera.de/en/home/
