On Mon, Feb 23, 2009 at 10:19:21PM -0500, Sam Hartman wrote: > I find it deeply ironic that I'm arguing against security. However, > let's remember that we're talking about debtags. It's always > important to think about your threat model and about how much > complexity you're willing to spend in order to get security. > > This seems like a case where usability is far more important than > security. If the system starts getting abused, we can lock it down > more.
Unfortunately the issue of choosing openid here is not on the debtags side: the problem lies where the user database is, that is on db.debian.org (maybe also on alioth). I perfectly understand that the people in charge of db.debian.org do not want to expose their password database through an OpenID identity provider: since they cannot decide what service providers would or would not use their services, they cannot rule out the scenario where a DD would get his Debian password stolen while trying to log into a random wiki, or where someone, unbeknownst to them, implements an insecure openid service provider allowing DDs to do something important. I understaind their choice of not providing the service over creating an ecosystem based on a very convenient but flawed identification mechanism that will risk drifting towards being used more and more, and more and more inappropriately as time passes. The big flaw of OpenID now seems to me to be that the service provider is easily able to weaken the security of the identity provider. Therefore the most important security aspect of OpenID is not to have a service provider where security is not important, but rather a user database whose security is not important. I can implement OpenID in a new Debtags web application, but people would have to get their identities out of something like their blogs. We could implement a Debian OpenID provider, but it'll have to be something else than the normal user database, in implmementation as well as in scope. Ciao, Enrico -- GPG key: 1024D/797EBFAB 2000-12-05 Enrico Zini <enr...@debian.org>
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