The next generation of Identity

This afternoon is the start of the Internet Identity Workshop in Mountain View. I am giving an overview of Identity 2.0 and what we are doing at Sxip Identity. We had been thinking about what are the key success factors for an Identity 2.0 and have come up with the following:

1. Internet scale
2. Community driven
3. Easy to adopt
4. Privacy protecting

I will expand more on these in a later posting.

We have also gotten feedback that the terms that we use in SXIP were not as descriptive as they could be, so we have come up with new ones:

1. Identity Agent
2. Identity Consumer
3. Identity Issuer

Identity Agent is the software that manages your identity for you and is where you authenticate. It may be a website (Homesite) or software running on your own machine or some combination of both.

Identity Consumer is the site that is requesting your identity data. The SXIP term for this was Membersite. Member implies some membership and was not really descriptive of what the site did. Relying Party implies that the identity data received is asserted or verified. The identity data may just be my list of favorite books. OpenID uses the term Consumer, and we thought that was descriptive and a better match.

Identity Issuer is the site that issues claims or assertions. Identity Provider in the Liberty sense is a combination of the Identity Agent and the Identity Issuer, so for clarity, that term was not used. Also, since the functionality is scoped to issuing claims, Identity Issuer is more specific. Passel uses the term Issuer as well.