Simon,

I am uncomfortable with your assertion, 

The interesting paradox here - which is often overlooked - is that the more that the contextual information is made public, the less likely it is to be faked.  
For example, I "know" everything there is to know about Justin Bieber - simply by Googling - which ironically makes it incredibly difficult for me to "fake" his identity, as there are several avenues to prove me wrong.

I would argue that I could use the public information available for Justin Bieber to begin setting up accounts using his name and identity characteristics that would be under my control.  I could then use these accounts to substantiate the creation of additional accounts and masquerade as Mr. Bieber in various online venues.

As for the value of relationships, I agree that there is value.  But it can be very difficult to use.  In LinkedIn, for example, when I am looking for a person, I can use relationships to try to narrow down my search.  For example, I can filter based on location (within 50 miles of London) or his current/former employer.  But in searching for people with common names, I often find that this does not help me because I don't know where the person lives or his employment history. 

Furthermore, wouldn't using relationships require that we establish database fields for the most common relationships in order to filter on them?  But what fields need to be included?  If we just allow device "owners" to add ten arbitrary fields that they consider most important for their device, won't we be limited the search to exact matches -- eliminating the ability to perform proximity searches.  For example, if I enter the data "2015" would that be the year I deployed the sensor, the altitude of the location of the sensor, or the serial number of the sensor?  If I enter instead "Serial Number = 2015", what will happen if someone seeking out my sensor searches for "Part Number = 2015" of "S/N = 2015"?

When the sensor changes owners (e.g., company A which owns the sensor is purchased by company B), will the owner be allowed to retain the data fields of the previous owner to keep everyone using the sensor from accessing it?  

I don't claim that these issues won't have solutions.  But as things get more complicated, the threat surface increases.  So there are consequences to this complexity -- whether through human error or evil intent.

Jeff




---------------------------------
Jeff Stollman
stollman.j@gmail.com
1 202.683.8699

Truth never triumphs — its opponents just die out.
Science advances one funeral at a time.
                                    Max Planck

On Tue, Jul 28, 2015 at 4:06 AM, Simon Moffatt <simon.moffatt@forgerock.com> wrote:
Hi Ingo

I think you make some subtly very powerful points here.  Uniqueness by static identifiers is difficult to uphold as you mention.  However, the powerful aspect is the relative context being applied, which results in local uniqueness.

That context information, such as where you work and your city, not only helps reduce the noise and pollution of unrelated identities, but it also reduces the scope of knowledge to those who know what living in that city or working at that company actually means.

The interesting paradox here - which is often overlooked - is that the more that the contextual information is made public, the less likely it is to be faked. 

For example, I "know" everything there is to know about Justin Bieber - simply by Googling - which ironically makes it incredibly difficult for me to "fake" his identity, as there are several avenues to prove me wrong.

The relationship aspect here is what helps not only identifier the person/thing/object but also verify it's existence and thus possible integrity.

Simon



On 27/07/15 19:54, Ingo.Friese@telekom.de wrote:

As we have already many IDs outside I doubt that we can propose a certain GUID. But of course you can use GUID if you need some kind of ID for your system.

 

Jeff, uniqueness is most likely not realistic. We don’t have no governance over all possible IDs. But the nice thing about identifying things with relationships is that identifier don’t have to be unique.

There are several “Ingo Friese” outside, but since you know “works with T-Labs” and “Lives in Berlin” you can find me regardless of my identifier.

The identifier than is usually mapped to a address (e.g. IP address). And addresses are unique in their domain.

 

From: j stollman [mailto:stollman.j@gmail.com]
Sent: Montag, 27. Juli 2015 20:45
To: Ranjan Jain (ranjain)
Cc: Friese, Ingo; afesta@alfweb.com; dg-idot@kantarainitiative.org
Subject: Re: [DG-IDoT] Common identity standard

 

Ranjan,

 

What would the GUID be based on?  How would you ensure its Uniqueness across industry sectors, across the globe, and over time?

 

Jeff


 

---------------------------------

Jeff Stollman
stollman.j@gmail.com
1 202.683.8699

 

Truth never triumphs — its opponents just die out.

Science advances one funeral at a time.

                                    Max Planck

 

On Mon, Jul 27, 2015 at 2:41 PM, Ranjan Jain (ranjain) <ranjain@cisco.com> wrote:

All great ideas so far.

 

How about using GUID as the identifier which can be tied to a “thing” and this GUID can have multiple personas based on the relationship? Ofcourse we’ll need some kind of discovery service and the things need to publish their meta data for usage but just wanted to get initial assessment. 

 

From: "Ingo.Friese@telekom.de" <Ingo.Friese@telekom.de>
Date: Monday, July 27, 2015 at 7:50 AM
To: "stollman.j@gmail.com" <stollman.j@gmail.com>, "afesta@alfweb.com" <afesta@alfweb.com>
Cc: "dg-idot@kantarainitiative.org" <dg-idot@kantarainitiative.org>
Subject: Re: [DG-IDoT] Common identity standard

 

Hi Jeff,

 

Regarding point 3. following thoughts:

 

-          The owner, admin, or user of a thing has to trigger an update…their might be services that do the update on behalf

-          In general we need an update mechanism, if e.g. an owner changes, it should be changed in discovery/search...not a big deal. Isn’ it?

 

From: dg-idot-bounces@kantarainitiative.org [mailto:dg-idot-bounces@kantarainitiative.org] On Behalf Of j stollman


Sent: Freitag, 24. Juli 2015 19:21
To: Alessandro Festa
Cc: dg-idot@kantarainitiative.org
Subject: Re: [DG-IDoT] Common identity standard

 

I am with Alessandro in the complexity of this solution in the real world.

 

  1. An iPhone is a collection of IoT devices (camera, audio recorder, touch screen, telephone, computer, etc.).  Should each of these have its own "good key pair"?  If not how do we handle the sale of just the camera by the same OEM who sells the camera to Apple?  Do we need a way to aggregate devices?
  2. Separately, what constitutes a "good key pair"?  Will all of the many unenlightened, non-high-tech manufacturers in the world participate?  What is the likelihood that they will create duplicate key pairs when there are billions of devices?  We tend to consider that we are servicing an environment where everyone is paying attention to international standards.  Standards in markets as broad as we are discussion take decades to become pervasive.  How many types of screws do we have?  It isn't just metric versus "standard."  Screws differ in diameter, pitch, head shape (flat, pan, etc.), and driver type (straight blade, phillips, head, star, etc.).  And then there are custom screws.  In IoT we will have hobbyist-types creating devices, along with old-line manufacturers.  It isn't just an Apply and Samsung world.
  3. To Ingo's comment about relationships, how do we track changes in those relationships without creating a massive infrastructure?  What happens when company A has a device that is used by employees A1, A2, and A3, sells the device to company B for use by B7, B8, and B9?

Jeff

 


 

---------------------------------

Jeff Stollman
stollman.j@gmail.com
1 202.683.8699

 

Truth never triumphs — its opponents just die out.

Science advances one funeral at a time.

                                    Max Planck

 

On Fri, Jul 24, 2015 at 7:34 AM, Alessandro Festa <afesta@alfweb.com> wrote:

Hi Nat,

related to the private key embeded by manufacturer I am wondering who would embed what in the case of a multi-manufacturer.

use case:

1) thing created by original manufacturer : embed a priv key

2) thing crafted/customized (oem) by second manufacturer : embed a priv key

 

when thing will need to act on behalf I expect to reflect a 1 to many relationship at this point and so I'll need as user to decide the degree of relationship between the various keys or only one single key pair will be allowed and this means we need to define a hierarchical policy to decide who will embed what.

 

I immagine an onion ring model based on user consent and relationship constrain: user to seller, seller to manufacturer (original or oem), manufacturer (oem) to manufacturer

 

 

Alex

 

-

Alessandro Festa 

twitter:@festaatdell

 

 

Il Venerdì 24 Luglio 2015 13:10, Paul Madsen <pmadsen@pingidentity.com> ha scritto:

 

Hi nat, I would follow on to your steps below

On 7/24/15 4:56 AM, Nat Sakimura wrote:

Yeah, it is nice, but WSDL would be too big. 

Remember that sending 1 byte over the radio takes as much power as encrypting 1000 bytes. Also, memory and processing power is becoming cheap, so in IoT context, we should probably treat "minimizing the radio packet" as the priority. 

 

As to the identification of the things are cocerned, the viable model that I imagine is as follows: 

 

  1. The device manufacutrer creates a good keypair and embeds the private key (and its key thumbprint) in the device. 
  2. For device authentication, use the key to sign the message.

When acting on behalf of a user

3. Authenticated user facilitates delivery of tokens to device
4. Device authenticates to AS using embedded keys in order to obtain tokens
5. Device uses tokens to authenticate to cloud endpoints, other device etc

Tokens thereby reflect 'relationship' of user & device

 

Nat

 

 

2015-07-22 1:33 GMT+09:00 Aninda Bhunia <abhunia@inc38.com>:

It would be interesting if we could create a standard that would allow even non IP devices to publish their identity through a wsdl type structure. Even if they are non IP at some point in their upwards relationship hierarchy their master gateway would be IP based and could be responsible for publishing the identity wsdls for the entities it brokers.
Thoughts ?

On Jul 21, 2015 11:52 AM, "Joni Brennan" <joni@kantarainitiative.org> wrote:

Noting I have no vote =)

 

I agree with Paul and others regarding discovery as the key initial mechanism.  I believe Ingo has also noted this in the summaries from IDoT.  Sal mentions NMAP / SNMP are there other exiting approaches?  (apologies if this has been discussed in detail already)

 

- Joni


Best Regards,


Joni Brennan
Kantara Initiative | Executive Director
email: joni @ kantarainitiative.org

Connecting Identity for a more trustworthy Internet - Overview

 

 

On Tue, Jul 21, 2015 at 8:42 AM, Salvatore D'Agostino <sal@idmachines.com> wrote:

Other than ip devices?  In that case there are mechanisms support scanning ( eg NMAP) or SNMP that have been around for a while these are typically not exactly API friendly but do provide a starting point and we make good use in our offerings.

Salvatore D'Agostino

IDmachines LLC |1264 Beacon Street, #5

Brookline, MA. 02446 | USA


On Jul 21, 2015, at 10:46 AM, Paul Madsen <pmadsen@pingidentity.com> wrote:

(one of) what is needed is a standardized mechanism for devices to present their identity (and those humans for which they are acting) to other things, cloud endpoints & applications

On 7/16/15 2:38 PM, Ranjan Jain (ranjain) wrote:

Hey y’all,

Hope everyone is doing well. Just wanted to bounce a question which I’m consistently getting asked around Identity, IoT perspective. Is there any industry standard in place or in works which can be used as a common standard across multiple identities. What I mean by this is that humans have SSN as an identity while a thermostat may have serial number while a network device may have a Mac ID as their identity. So, while individually they all have their own identity standard, when in the IoT world, all these entities start interacting with each other, how do we translate one identity into another or how will one identity interact with another identity in a standards way?

 

Thanks

Ranjan

 

 

 

Ranjan Jain
ARCHITECT.IT
Information Technology
ranjain@cisco.com
Phone: +1 408 853 4396
Mobile: +1 408 627 9538

Cisco Systems, Inc.
400 East Tasman Drive
San Jose
California
95134
United States
Cisco.com

 

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