Yes, a breakdown of the concerns would be a useful entry point. | Sent from my iPhone | Please Forgive Typos _________________ | Dazza Greenwood, JD | CIVICS.com, Founder & Principal | MIT Media Lab, Visiting Scientist | Vmail: 617.500.3644 | Email: dazza@CIVICS.com | Biz: http://CIVICS.com | MIT: https://law.MIT.edu | Me: DazzaGreenwood.com | Twitter: @DazzaGreenwood | Google+: google.com/+DazzaGreenwood | LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/DazzaGreenwood | GitHub: github.com/DazzaGreenwood/Interface
On Oct 29, 2015, at 7:41 AM, Andrew Hughes <andrewhughes3000@gmail.com> wrote:
A quick observation about this and other related threads:
The NIST call for comment (and some of the responses I've seen so far) take quite an absolutist point of view.
The particular example given by NIST: "Many organizations now allow online customers to use third-party credentials to create and manage accounts and services. For example, your social media account login can be used to access your fitness tracker account. In effect, the social media company is vouching for you with the tracker company."
It's a mash of concerns and hinted-at fears and sets up what might be a false argument. Using a 'social account' to a consumer-driven 'fitness tracker' is not a good basis to argue for or against Credential Brokers, Gateways, fancy crypto blinding etc.
Justin, John and others are highlighting what might be a typical pattern in technology adoption: the move from outlier/leading edge, to brokered solutions to multiply visibility and increase ease of market penetration, to discovery aggregators to peer-to-peer oriented connection finders. (Please don't pick on the list - it's an extemporaneous sample).
So: should we be attempting to treat some of the concerns somewhat independently? a) The wish to move to person-selected authentication/identity providers for easing multi-credential burden b) The need for discovery, marketing and publication services to increase market penetration c) The desire to offer unobservability and non-linkability properties to those who need or want them d) The need to remove brokers/gateways when appropriate e) The wish to defeat large scale analytics-based profiling
Reactions?
andrew. Andrew Hughes CISM CISSP Independent Consultant In Turn Information Management Consulting
o +1 650.209.7542 m +1 250.888.9474 1249 Palmer Road, Victoria, BC V8P 2H8 AndrewHughes3000@gmail.com ca.linkedin.com/pub/andrew-hughes/a/58/682/ Identity Management | IT Governance | Information Security
On Wed, Oct 28, 2015 at 11:23 PM, Eve Maler <eve@xmlgrrl.com> wrote: Okay, I’ll be the contrarian, just for fun.
As I commented to a couple of people regarding the relatively recent academic paper Toward Mending Two Nation-Scale Brokered Identification Systems, everything is tradeoffs. And it’s arguable that the governments in those cases made the operationally and more citizen-acceptable tradeoff for privacy vs. what the researchers recommended.
Quoting/paraphrasing myself from previous threads on this topic:
I suspected from a brief article on the subject that the reporter probably had trouble divining exactly what the problem with the FCCX and UK.Gov Verify systems actually was, since it wasn't explained at all, nor what the proposed solution was... and it's all extremely subtle. And I'm not even seeing a huge outcry or even all that much gov followup/panicked defense after.
The researchers found a limitation in the tradeoff choice that the FCCX and UK.Gov Verify system designers made. This tradeoff prizes the ability for the user to use an online service ("relying party") and an identity provider, free from worrying that the two will discover who the other is, over the perfect ability for a pseudonymous identifier and attributes representing the user to pass unseen through the broker in the middle (the broker makes this "service blinding" possible). The researchers propose some clever encryption tricks to guard against the broker seeing things, and go further and propose a new user-chosen "identity integration" service that could handle the tricks. Given that brokered systems, and the "older" protocols such as SAML already in use, and the encryption tricks they suggest, and user interfaces that force users to choose services, are all considered extremely heavyweight and expensive in various ways, I give the researchers' suggestions a nil chance of succeeding in the current environment. And given that users have a variety of incentives to share enough attributes in everyday circumstances to routinely become identifiable (Latanya Sweeney's research in particular is famous for discovering these properties), it's very questionable whether the researchers' preference for tradeoffs vs. the nations' preference is the correct one.
On 25 Oct 2015, at 7:49 AM, Mark Dobrinic <mdobrinic@cozmanova.com> wrote:
Yes, that.
Always looking at privacy from linkablility and anonymity perspectives. An Identity Broker with privacy in mind has the responsibility to protect those properties. Through policy, but also some funky cryptography could be applied to assist there.
But yeah, in the end they have the potential to only make things worse from a privacy point of view, and not better.
Cheers!
Mark
On 24/10/15 08:24, Justin Richer wrote: My view on this remains “to increase privacy get rid of brokers”. A full mesh SAML or PKI federation is untenable, so that’s why we’ve deployed brokers in the past. But OIDC, with dynamic client registration and server discovery, is built for this. I believe wee need to move towards this model.
Is anyone interested in writing up a response to that effect with me? Perhaps we could run a session on it at IIW this week for those of us that will be there (including myself).
— Justin
On Oct 23, 2015, at 8:29 AM, Andrew Hughes <andrewhughes3000@gmail.com <mailto:andrewhughes3000@gmail.com>> wrote:
Hi UMAnitarians - not sure if you've seen this notice yet
I'm vice-chair of IAWG & we are probably going to assemble comments on this.
"Privacy-Enhanced Identity Brokers"
Comments to inform a new collaborative project & eventual 1800 series Practice Guide at the NIST NCCoE
Due 18 December
http://www.nist.gov/itl/acd/ncce/20151022privacy.cfm
*Andrew Hughes *CISM CISSP Independent Consultant *In Turn Information Management Consulting*
o +1 650.209.7542 <tel:%2B1%20650.209.7542> m +1 250.888.9474 <tel:%2B1%20250.888.9474> 1249 Palmer Road, Victoria, BC V8P 2H8 AndrewHughes3000@gmail.com <mailto:AndrewHughes3000@gmail.com> ca.linkedin.com/pub/andrew-hughes/a/58/682/ <http://ca.linkedin.com/pub/andrew-hughes/a/58/682/> *Identity Management | IT Governance | Information Security *
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