OpenID Connect Proposal to Build Decentralized Identity Systems for Social Web
By Partho, Gaea News NetworkSunday, May 16, 2010
The key architect of OpenID and identity technologies, David Recordon has drafted a new proposal to define a new direction for OpenID. Recordon’s proposal was drafted with input from several people in the OpenID community and is called OpenID Connect. The new mechanism essentially rebuilds OpenID on top of oAuth 2.0 combining the two popular open source systems for authenticating users and letting them share data with social websites and applications. OpenID Connect tries to amalgamate the best of two distinct technology to create a single technology stack that simpler for everyone to use.
The blue print approach combines several interactions around logging in and sharing data with a website or application into one simple step. The user can also log in using either a profile URL. a blog URL or an email address. One of the big changes with OpenID could be support for e-mail addresses. Currently it requires the users to type the URL , which is confusing for people who used to type a user name.
Both OpenID and OAuth have witnessed wide adoption across social sites and applications over the last couple of years. However, both suffer from problems of usability and complexity. OAuth 2.0 has been finalized and already been adopted by Facebook in its Open Graph API and Twitter in @anywhere.
OpenID Connect OAuth components will allow publishers to request more information from a user when they log in using OpenID.
OpenID Connect’s OAuth components would allow publishers to request more information from a user when they log in using OpenID, but do so in a way that lets the user maintain control and only grant access to the specific pieces of data they are comfortable sharing.
In addition, another key issue that OpenID Connect aims to solve is one of singular adoption across multiple platforms — the web, the desktop, and mobile phones.
The technologies are designed for two separate purposes. OpenID is a way of proving to a server that you are who you say and OAuth is a way through which an application can access information such as photos or your address book through web APIs.
Majority of social client applications on mobile and desktop such as those that post status updates and photos to Twitter or Facebook use OAuth to log in. That said, it’s quite tricky for them to add support for OpenID, as it was primarily designed for use on websites. The new proposal will allow apps on all platforms to use the same protocol to handle logins and access web APIs.
These developments basically defines the main aim of OpenID Connect that is to make adopting and using decentralized identity systems simpler.
