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* Microsoft Hailstorm and Passport
Microsoft Passport is a centralized database hosted by
Microsoft that enhances the consumer experience with the Web
by providing a single logon system that they can use across a
number of participant web sites.
As you might know by now from our extensive <a
href="faq.html">FAQ</a>, the Mono project has nothing to do
with Microsoft Hailstorm or <a
href="http://www.passport.com">Microsoft Passport.</a>
Still a lot of people have asked us our opinion on them.
** Passport
Passport is important not because of it being breaktrough
technologically speaking, but because the company is in a
position to drive most people toward being suscribers of it.
At the time of this writing passport is required to use the
free mail service <a href="http://www.hotmail.com">Hotmail</a>
to get customized support for the <a
href="http://www.msn.com">MSN portal</a>, <a
href="http://msdn.microsoft.com">Microsoft Developers
Network</a> and according to the original announcement from
Microsoft <a href="http://www.americanexpress.com">American
Express</a> and <a href="http://www.ebay.com">EBay</a> will be
adopting it.
There is already a <a
href="http://www.passport.com/Directory/Default.asp?PPDir=C&lc=1033">Large
list</a> of participating sites.
There are many current users of it and Microsoft will be
driving more users towards Passport as it <a
href="http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1003-200-6343275.html">integrates
it</a> in their upcoming release of Windows.
Microsoft has also <a
href="http://www.passport.com/Business/JoinPassportNetwork.asp?lc=1033">developed
a toolkit</a> to enable current web merchants to integrate
their services with passport.
To the end user, there is a clear benefit: they only have to
log into a single network and not remember multiple passwords
across sites on the internet. Companies that adopt passport
will have a competition advantage over those that dont.
Microsoft lists a list of <a
href="http://www.passport.com/Business/Default.asp?lc=1033">benefits</a>
to companies.
** The problems of Passport
There are a number of concerns that different groups have over
Passport. Sometimes I have some, sometimes I do not. But
overall, consumers and businesses can have better solutions.
<ul>
* <b>Single Point of Failure:</b> As more services and
components depend on remote servers, functionality can
grind to a halt if there is a failure on the
centralized Passport system.
Such a failure was predicted, and we recently <a
href="http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200-6473003.html">witnessed</a>
got a lot of people worried.
The outgage lasted for seven days. Think what this
could do to your business.
* <b>Trust:</b> Not everyone trusts Microsoft to keep
their information confidential. Concerns are not only
at the corporate level policy, but also the fact that
the source code for Microsoft products is not
available, means that trojans or worms could be built
into the products by malicious engineers. This is not
unheard of, as the <a
href="http://slashdot.org/articles/00/04/14/0619206.shtml">Microsoft
Internet Server</a> had a trojan horse built into that
allowed anyone that knew about this to control any
server running IIS.
* <b>Security:</b> With a centralized system like
Passport, imagine the repercussions of a malicious
hacker gaining access to the Passport database.
Personal information and credit card information about
almost everyone using a computer could be stored there.
Hackers have already <a
href="http://slashdot.org/articles/00/10/27/1147248.shtml">broken
into Microsoft</a> in the past. And the company was
unable to figure out for how long their systems had been hacked.
</ul>
Microsoft might or might not realize this. The idea behind
Passport is indeed a good one (I can start to get rid of my
file that keeps track of the 30 logins and passwords or so
that I use across the various services on the net myself).
** Alternatives to Microsoft Passport
An alternative to Microsoft Passport needs to take the above
problems into consideration. Any solution of the form `We
will just have a competing offering' will not work.
The system thus has to be:
<ul>
* <b>Distributed:</b> The entire authentication
system should not create an internet `blackout' in the
case of failure.
* <b>Allow for multiple registrars:</b> Users should
be able to choose a registrar (their banks, local
phone company, service provider, Swiss bank, or any
other entity they trust.
* <b>Mandate good security measures:</b> As a
principle, only Open Source software should be used
for servers in the registrar, and they should conform
to a standard set of tools and software that can be
examined by third parties.
</ul>
An implementation of this protocol could use the DNS or a
DNS-like setup to distribute the information of users with the
possibility of replicating and caching public information
about the user.
For instant messaging (another pieces of the Hailstorm bit),
you want to use a non-centralized system like Sun's <a
href="http://www.jxta.org">JXTA</a>. Some people mailed me to
mention Jabber as a messaging platform.
It could also just use the user e-mail address as the `key' to
choose the registrar (msn.com, hotmail.com -> passport.com;
aol.com -> aol.passport.com; you get the idea).
The <a
href="http://www.soapware.org/xmlStorageSystem">xmlStorage</a>
idea from <a href="http://www.scripting.com">Dave Winer</a>
could be used to store the information.
A toolkit for various popular web servers could be provided,
authenticated and should be open sourced (for those of you who
think that a binary program would give more security and would
prevent people from tampering: you are wrong. You can always
use a proxy system that "behaves" like the binary, and passes
information back and forth from the real program, and snoops
in-transit information).
Good cryptographers need to be involved in this problem to
figure out the details and the possible insecure pieces of a
proposal like this.
** Implementation: In short
To keep it short: <b>DNS, JXTA, xmlStorage.</b>
** Deploying it
The implementation of such a system should be a pretty
straightforward tasks once security cryptographers have
designed such a beast.
The major problems are:
<ul>
* <b>People might just not care:</b> In a poll to US
citizens a couple of decades ago, it was found that
most people did not care about the rights they were
given by the Bill of Rights, which lead to a number of
laws to be passed in the US that eliminated most of
the rights people had.
* <b>The industry will move way too slow:</b>
Microsoft's implementation is out in the open now: it
is being deployed, and soon it will be insinuated to
many, many users. The industry needs to get together
soon if they care about this issue.
By the time the industry reacts, it might be too
late.
</ul>
** Passport and Mono
The .NET class libraries includes a Passport class that
applications might use to authenticate with Passport. Since
we do not have information at this point on the exact protocol
of Passport, it is not even feasible to implement it.
If at some point the information is disclosed, it could be
implemented.
If a competing system to Passport existed, we could probably
hide all the authentication information to use a number of
different passport-like systems.
If a user does not want to use Passport at all, he could
always turn it off (or completely remove the class from the
library). After all, this is free software.
Currently, we are too far from the point where this is a real
issue.
** Disclaimer
This is just a group of personal thoughts of mine that I have
placed here because I get asked this question a lot lately.
The views of this page are not a statement from my employer
(Ximian, Inc).
This is not part of Mono. We are not trying to deal with this
problem.
Nat Friedman (Ximian's co-founder) has his own ideas on how a
competing system to Passport could be designed, but I will let
<a href="http://www.nat.org/gym">him</a> post his own story.
** Other Alternatives
Some people have pointed out <a
href="http://www.xns.org">XNS</a>
Send comments to me: Miguel de Icaza (<a
href="mailto:miguel@ximian.com">miguel@ximian.com</a>)
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