Thanks Nat and Aninda. 
From your responses, I see one thing is common which is the identifier discovery mechanism to get more attributes about the identity provided the entity is allowed to interact with that identifier.

Let me think a bit more on this and respond back with more questions.

From: Nat Sakimura <sakimura@gmail.com>
Date: Thursday, July 16, 2015 at 10:25 PM
To: Aninda Bhunia <abhunia@inc38.com>
Cc: Ranjan Jain <ranjain@cisco.com>, "dg-idot@kantarainitiative.org" <dg-idot@kantarainitiative.org>
Subject: Re: [DG-IDoT] Common identity standard

Hi Ranjan, 

I suppose you meant identifier, not identity. 
Identity is often defined as 'set of attributes related to an entity' (ISO/IEC 29115, ITU-T X.1254, OpenID Connect, etc.). It can be represented in many ways, but X.509 (ASN.1), SAML(XML), ID Token (JSON) are some of the popular formats. 

There is no single standard for identifier. 
However, we can represent them as URIs or URNs. XRI is another candidate. 

One advantage of using URI/XRI is that you can resolve it to get more data about it. 

My 2c.  

Nat Sakimura 


On Thursday, July 16, 2015, Aninda Bhunia <abhunia@inc38.com> wrote:
Hi Ranjan,
You bring up interesting points but the question i believe, we need to ask, is why (if at all) do we need to 'exchange' identity information and does it make practical sense to have just one common identity structure in the IoT ecosystem?

I dont think it would be practical nor scalable to have just one common identity structure. Rather we need to have a flexible schema and a universal discovery mechanism for identity attributes based on the type of service an entity is interested in interacting with. Such a framework could be configured with hierarchical rule sets which govern what 'kinds' of entities are authorized to interact with the entity domain the rules govern and with 'what capacity'.

would be interested in hearing other's thoughts.

Aninda


On Thu, Jul 16, 2015 at 2:38 PM, Ranjan Jain (ranjain) <ranjain@cisco.com> 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

 Think before you print.

This email may contain confidential and privileged material for the sole use of the intended recipient. Any review, use, distribution or disclosure by others is strictly prohibited. If you are not the intended recipient (or authorized to receive for the recipient), please contact the sender by reply email and delete all copies of this message.


_______________________________________________
DG-IDoT mailing list
DG-IDoT@kantarainitiative.org
http://kantarainitiative.org/mailman/listinfo/dg-idot




--

Aninda Bhunia

President, The Incubate Group

416.418.1674 (Phone)

(888) 483-3818 (fax) 

abhunia@inc38.com

www.inc38.com



--
Nat Sakimura (=nat)
Chairman, OpenID Foundation
http://nat.sakimura.org/
@_nat_en