Hi all,

First of all, thank you to those of you who attended last week's DAS Workshop. 
I thought we had some interesting talks and, as ever, some productive and 
thought provoking discussions. As a follow up to the third day's discussion on 
authentication, I thought I would provide a quick summary:

There was an initial overview about the prospect of adopting OpenID delegated 
authentication in DAS (which is already used by the DAS registry and some DAS 
clients). Specifically, the core reliance of OpenID on HTTP browser redirects 
makes in unsuitable for DAS server-server communications.

Afterwards, two proposals emerged: firstly, that the DAS specification make a 
simple recommendation to use existing HTTP digest authentication, leaving DAS 
software to implement the components independently. Secondly, a DAS-specific 
delegated authentication model based around a trusted third party (probably the 
DAS registry) as the identity provider.

Each proposal has its own advantages and disadvantages in terms of both 
security and implementation considerations which we now need to debate within 
the community before we come up with a recommendation, so I have summarised 
both proposals on the wiki:
http://www.biodas.org/wiki/DAS1.6E#Authentication

Please feel free to edit as necessary, and comment on the list.

Cheers,
Andy
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