Hallam-Baker, Phillip wrote:
>
> Well we already have a specification for that, it is the core
> architecture of the Internet: DNS. We use the DNS SRV record for service
> discovery. It is what it is designed for. It provides for fault
> tolerance, load balancing, fall over just like an email MX record.
>
Thanks for another voice in favor of DNS. I was beginning to feel like
the only one on this side of the fence. :)
> The simplest discovery mechanism then is:
>
> _openid.example.com SRV 1 100 80 openid.example.com
>
I did consider SRV, but the "return value" from OpenID discovery is not
a hostname, it's a structure like this:
* Endpoint URL
* "Final" claimed identifier (after following redirects)
* OP-local identifier (or "delegate" in 1.1 terminology)
* OpenID version (either 1.1 or 2.0, currently)
Some of these we can infer. For example, in my DNS-based proposal I just
assumed that all email-based identifiers would use OpenID 2.0, because a
provider's going to have to change their implementation anyway so they
might as well upgrade to 2.0 while they're at it if they don't support
it already.
I went with a TXT record with a custom serialization, despite it being
technically incorrect, both so that the information required for the
above structure could be represented and also so that it can be deployed
on DNS providers that only allow A, CNAME, MX and TXT records to be
configured. The latter is important for the delegation case, as the main
audience for delegation is people with vanity domains.
>
> OK so now lets think about market building a bit. Lets try to embrace
> and extend the competition. In my view the value of OpenID is not so
> much the protocol as the idea of an interoperable identifier. So lets
> try to capture the SAML and WS-* worlds as well.
>
> We can do this with a policy declaration:
>
> _openid.example.com TXT "v=openid openid saml"
> _openid.example.com SRV 1 100 80 openid1.example.com
> _openid.example.com SRV 1 100 80 openid2.example.com
> _saml.example.com SRV 1 100 80 saml1.example.com
> _saml.example.com SRV 1 100 80 saml2.example.com
>
And I infer from this that you're not adverse to the idea of encoding
custom formats in TXT records, so hopefully you'll appreciate my approach.
However, if you've got an alternative proposal that's more "DNS-pure"
I'd be happy to hear it. I don't claim to be a DNS expert. However, it'd
take a very convincing argument for me to get behind anything that
requires something other than A, CNAME, MX and TXT records though, for
the reasons stated above.
(In case you haven't seen it, my current strawman proposal is here:
http://www.apparently.me.uk/18285.html
)
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