[CLUE-Talk] MS Passport and Linux equivalent

[Dave Anselmi]

Kevin Cullis wrote:

> Hey,
>
> Anyone worked with MS Passport and are there any equivalent (or better)
> functionality in Linux?

I have used MS passport.  It is relatively invisible to the user, so it's
hard to tell how much it gets used after you put your password in the first
time.  But it seems to work.

There is a Liberty Alliance Project which aims for the same thing without
such centralized control:

http://www.projectliberty.org/

You can google for articles, I don't think there is any software for it
yet, Linux or otherwise.

MS claims that the accusations of world domination aimed at passport are
unfounded.  Their vision (at least publicly) is that companies or other
interested groups will use passport servers to provide identification
services to their members.  There will be a mechanism for each groups
servers to provide services to other groups, with varying levels of
visibility and trust.  Seems to me that's pretty much what you'd want.

I haven't looked to closely at passport's implementation, but I don't think
MS has developed anything extraordinary.  This is a well known but
difficult problem and the tools, crypto, directories, etc, have been around
a long time.  The only thing MS may have added is a standard or protocol to
provide I&A on a large scale.  That may be a good thing, the next step
towards rolling up our sleeves and just doing it, which is how most hard
problems get solved.  Of course, if the standard is open, there will be
OpenSource implementations and freedom to participate or not in MS's
service.  If the standards aren't open, they'll be replaced by different
ones that are.

Dave