Saturday, January 06, 2007

Locality is not baked in

Dave Kearns writes (in reference to one of Eve's posts):

Where we differ is in where the data will be stored. Eve, as a faithful follower of the Liberty Alliance spec, expects an "in-the-net" service to do everything

This shows that Dave "suffers from" the common misconception (perhaps caused by some of Liberty's marketing materials) that the protocols have some "in-the-net" concept baked into them. This isn't the case. In fact, in a large part due to the participation of folks like Nokia, Gemplus and others, Liberty's protocols were designed to be location independent. Any entity defined by Liberty can live "in-the-net". "in-the-handset", "in-the-pc", or pretty much anywhere.

What Liberty has defined is the protocols used by the entity, regardless of where it lives, to provide the necessary services for the user. This includes the IdP, the Discovery Service, the People Service, etc.

In fact, in some of the work that is currently in progress in the Advanced Client Technologies, we're working on enabling that local, "in-the-phone" service to optionally make use of "in-the-net" components to form a hybrid implementation to best meet the user's connectivity needs.

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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

or “in-your-smart-card”, yes pretty much anywhere.

BTW, Gemplus is now called Gemalto.

Gemalto has been championing user-centric identity in Liberty even before it was in fashion, under the purview of the Liberty iClient effort (LECP), back in the day. Checkout Liberty Demo at Burton Catalyst 2004, Europe.

While most people often equate mobility with "in-the-phone", even in the-phone identity is represented via a smart card in the form of a SIM chip. This is what enables a seamless identity handoff when changing phones to meet one’s vanity requirements.

Beyond “in-the-net”, PCs and phones are not the only digital identity carrier.