Here is a summary of what Bill Gates said about OpenID and CardSpace at his RSA conference keynote. (Thanks to Mike Jones, who took these notes and let me publish them):
- Slide: Evolution of Identity: Making the Vision Real (with picture of two cards in hands)
- People are used to choosing what credential to use where for what purpose (talking about cards in our wallets)
- We use a variety of physical tokens to represent these things
- CardSpace creates a vehicle to allow people to have a GUI for credentials that represent their identities or personas in particular situations
- Each thing in the physical world conveys a particular set of information and discloses just enough information
- CardSpace provides a drag & drop interface for identity
- People will have to acclimate to it
- People can create their own credentials and others can give you credentials
- The system reasons about what the right credential is for you to simplify things for users
- WS-* hints about what credentials that are being looked for
- CardSpace shows candidates for credentials
Then they segued to the OpenID collaboration announcement:
- Issues of reputation and trust are foundational on the Internet
- Different levels of trust are needed in different contexts, such as blogs and access to enterprise resources
- People have been thinking about issues of trust
- OpenID 2.0 is doing this in the blog / Web 2.0 world, others are coming at this from the enterprise space
- We see these approaches as being complementary
- “Today we are announcing that we are supporting OpenID 2.0 and that they’re extending what they’ve done to enable the use of strong credentials”
- They’re doing this because they see that it solves problems and attacks that a pure password approach has
- We’re excited about this marriage of CardSpace and Web 2.0
- This will help eliminate the possibility of man-in-the-middle attacks
- CardSpace is built on our work on the WS-* specifications
- OpenID will be endorsing the CardSpace marriage later today
- We see this as a very smooth continuum with a common GUI metaphor
Wow, how far a little identity URL can go!