Thursday, September 25, 2008

Cardspace, Liberty, & Intel's ICP

A couple of weeks back at DIDW 2008, I reported on a proof-of-concept that we put together at Intel where we combined Cardspace with our Identity Capable Platform (ICP) to show how ICP could extend/strengthen a cardspace deployment. While we used Cardspace in this demonstration, the code should work with any Identity Selector conforming to the Identity Selector Interoperability Profile.

For those of you who don't know, ICP is a research project we have been working on at Intel exploring how identity capabilities could be added to a platform to enhance online transactions. Our contributions to the Liberty Alliance's Advanced Client Technologies are part of that work.

In this proof-of-concept, we showed how a mythical bank (ACME Bank, of course) could provision an identity agent to the platform which was then subsequently used as the identity source for Cardspace when the user initiated a session at the bank. To Cardspace, the identity agent was a full fledged STS and had a managed card that has been provisioned into Cardspace (so, essentially, this was an off-the-shelf Cardspace deployment).

The provisioning process made extensive use of the Liberty Advanced Client Technologies protocols to securely provision the identity agent to the platform.

One might ask what exactly is an identity agent. I use the term very loosely to define any identity related agent software. In this particular case, the identity agent exposes WS-Trust and ID-WSF Provisioned Module interfaces as well as containing a SAML token generator and an ID-WSF IdP Service client (to be able to get minting assertions).

If you want to take a look at the presentation it's here. However, I have to warn you I write my presentations as something that needs speaking to and not as standalone documents.

Even better, there's going to be an encore presentation as a Liberty webcast on November 18th. I'll post the details once I get them.

UPDATE: Britta found it for me: Info/Registration for Webcast . Where would we be without Britta!

Tags : / / / / / / /

No comments: