Liberty Alliance Project - Newsletter

Interview with Ken Klingenstein, Director of Middleware

Ken answers the following 5 questions:
1) Why did you (Internet2) join the Liberty Alliance?
2) How do you expect the Liberty Alliance to impact the Internet?
3) How will being in the Liberty Alliance help advance Internet2's objectives?
4) What do you see as the biggest challenge/obstacle to identity management?
5) What business problems will digital identity help solve?

Jon Udell: The social benefits of digital identity

"... Passport, Liberty, Shibboleth, and PingID are all examples of cert-agnostic identity providers. You could use a cert to authenticate; equally you could use name/password, biometrics, or something else. So why do people need key pairs? Answer: to do crypto. We can't remember keys, and we can't do crypto in our heads, so we need to store keys somewhere. ..."

Jon Udell: Belated notes from Digital ID World

"... Ken Klingenstein, who is project director for the Internet2 Middleware Initiative and Chief Technologist at the University of Colorado at Boulder, is a firehose of information about, and enthusiasm for, Shibboleth. It is, first of all, a scheme for federated Web SSO -- or as Ken says, ISO, for Initial Sign On. OpenSAML is the format used to share authentication assertions within a federation. It's therefore Liberty-like, but with a privacy twist that Liberty hasn't (yet) addressed. In Shibboleth there's strong accounting of which items of personal info are released. That, as much as the SSO effect, is what makes Ken think this system could have commercial legs. ..."