Phillip

The term was defined and used in literature and by analysts 6 or 7 years ago.

Many assumed it meant the user was in control or the focus -- I find that 
definition misleading and hides the significant scale advantages of the 
architecture. I just realized that my old blog is offline, where I had defined 
the term in the past. Hmmm, perhaps time to pull that off the shelf and polish 
it up again.

-- Dick

On 2011-07-20, at 12:24 PM, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:

> I think we should make the term user centric mean what it appears to mean - 
> make the user the focus of the design.
> 
> One of the ways in which OpenID lost its way was the obsession with making it 
> easy for bloggers to deploy and even weirder for people to be able to set up 
> Idps. Both of these came across as much higher priorities in the design than 
> the user experience.
> 
> It should not be unnecessarily hard for bloggers to add support for an 
> Identity protocol, but that should not be a higher goal than the user and in 
> particular support for legacy versions of platform infrastructure seems like 
> it should be a non-issue.
> 
> 
> One consequence of this approach is that you want to make sure that the user 
> is able to control all the flows of information that affect them and that 
> when things break the user should know where and why. That in turn tends 
> towards a protocol architecture where the user is in the hub of all the 
> protocol message flows but I would see that as a (minor) technical 
> consequence of the deeper philosophical approach.
> 
> 
> On the account identifier approach, I stand by the assertion that the user 
> should recognize their account by means of an identifier of the form 
> [email protected] where idp-service.com is the DNS name of the service 
> provider.
> 
> Now it may be useful to bind claims referring to other accounts with that 
> form, but that is a separate matter.
> 
> When the user types in something into a client to configure their service, 
> the string should be [email protected].
> 
> Then when they go to the idp-service.com site to configure their service they 
> might bind their gmail and yahoo accounts to it.
> 
> 
> One other consequence of being user-centric is that it allows for a two point 
> deployment model. I am currently working on an account management protocol 
> that allows me to manage all my usernames and passwords for all of my sites 
> from any browser I have authorized to have access. 
> 
> In this scheme I don't care whether the Huffington Post supports my protocol 
> or not. They don't get a choice. I am storing my username and password for 
> the huffpost in my chosen cloud because that is a very low value data 
> resource to me and I could not give a flying monkey if it is compromised. I 
> just don't care. 
> 
> Now my Fidelity account is another matter. There I care quite a lot. I am not 
> going to put a raw password in there but I might allow it to be used as an 
> additional factor.
> 
> 
> So in this scheme I will occasionally need to bind a client running on a new 
> machine to the service. And this is one of the few times that I need to 
> expose that account identifier. I give the identifier to the client, 
> authorize the binding using my second factor confirmation and the client is 
> then bound by a public keypair that is unique to that device and cannot be 
> exported.
> 

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