Identify Yourself, Sign-On With mIDm
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In the close future, you could end up signing on for every Web site you need just once by declaring your identity. “My - Dee - Me,” allows you to self indetify your name and eliminates the need for any central registry or authentication service.
What this does, in effect, is establish a regime where a person’s own declaration is the primary source of his or her identity - their own identity server.
Whith mIDm, any user can personalize the level of security requested. Do they just need cookies, or there is some secret document to hide?
If mIDm will be largely used, a mechanism whereby any Web service may request identification could become the standard.
The idea behind mIDm - pronounced “My - Dee - Me” - is that people using the Web can log in once, on their own Web site, and then forget about logging in anywhere else. It is, in essence, single sign-on for the people.
Billions of words have been written about user identity on the Web. Numerous solutions have been proposed: to name a few, Passport, Liberty Alliance, LID, SxIP, PKI, CoSign and more…
Equally obviously, however, is the fact that no identity management solution has taken hold in any large measure on the World Wide Web. While it would be premature and in a certain sense outright wrong to call any of these initiatives a failure, it nonetheless remains true that for the vast majority of people, on the vast majority of websites, identity continues to be managed via a simple login with a username and a password.
The bulk of the initiatives listed above - if not all of them - are attempting to build something more. Sure, all of them offer some form of single sign-on - that is, a system whereby you enter your username and password once, and then access resources from a number of sites. But in addition, they are also attempting to provide some mechanism for authenticating these logins, that is, some way of asserting that the information supplied in these web forms is true.
And in order to ensure that the assertion is true, these systems employ some sort of central registry or authentication service. Part of this is driven out of pure practicality: how could a website know where to look for information about the user unless the user is registered somewhere? And part of this is driven by the desire for verification: while the Web site may not implicitly trust the user, it does trust the authentication service…
[Continue reading mIDm - Self-Identification the World Wide Web at Stephen’s Web]
