Thank you Evernote!

The fantastic news in the saga of working to reclaim my wife's Evernote account has a very happy ending. In working with the Evernote support team (which is incredibly helpful) it appeared that the only option was to create a brand new Evernote account and then import the notes that were sync'd on her laptop. This was a less than ideal solution because it meant her old account would be orphaned and accessible to the person who owned the email address I mistakenly used when registering her account. Because of this I've been delaying setting up my wife's new Evernote account.

You can't imagine my happiness when I fired up Evernote on her laptop this morning and was directed to the web to reset her password. On the page where there used to be just a "An email has been sent" message, there was a "I didn't get the email" button. That took me through a new 'account recovery' flow that allowed me to reclaim my wife's original account (rather than create a new one). Basically, I had to enter the email address I had used to register the account as well as my wife's username and old password. From there I could reset the password. Now that I had reclaimed the account, I went in and fixed my email mistake so I won't get stuck in this situation again:)

THANK YOU EVERNOTE!!!

Another reason to get rid of passwords

This morning I had a very unpleasant experience regarding passwords. A couple years ago I set up an Evernote account for my wife (I had recently given her an iPad). With the recent evernote hack and exposure, I wanted to help her reset her password and get her iPad and laptop apps back in a working order. This should be a very simple and straight forward process... except for one minor problem that has effectively locked my wife out of her account.

The problem? I accidentally registered her account with the wrong email address. My wife uses an email provider that supports multiple email domains and without thinking I used the wrong domain. Now it appears that Evernote has chosen to only support resetting passwords via an email message and that, using an email address that was never verified. So my wife can ask for as many "reset emails" as she wants, but she will never receive them and Evernote does not appear to provide any other mechanism to reset a password.

While I'm very frustrated with my own mistake in setting up the account, I can't believe that Evernote would allow password reset flows with unverified email addresses.

OpenID Foundation Community Board Election

Wow! A year has passed and once again the OpenID Foundation is holding an election for 5 new Community Board members. This is a great opportunity to participate in an organization that is making a difference in consumer facing identity standards. I'm excited about the opportunities for both Account Chooser (simplifying the user experience) and OpenID Connect (expanding the set of use cases for federated identity). I am again running for one of the community board seats and would greatly appreciate your vote.

If you are not a member, joining the OpenID Foundation is easy and only costs $25/year. Here is my nomination statement.

I am the Chief Architect for Consumer Identities at AOL Inc. and a long time OpenID supporter. My history starts with AOL (my employer) being one of the first major identity providers to support OpenID 1.0. I have contributed to the OpenID 2.0 specification along with a number of the OpenID 2.0 extensions. I’m now an active contributor to the OpenID
Connect specifications. In addition, I have experience participating in a number of industry standards organizations (OIDF, IETF, OASIS, Kantara Initiative) working on identity related protocols and specifications.

I am very excited about the technology currently under development within the OpenID Foundation such as Account Chooser and OpenID Connect. Account Chooser has the opportunity to significantly simplify the login experience for many of today's internet users. In concert with Account Chooser, OpenID Connect addresses a very broad range of both social and enterprise use cases. Keeping Authentication separate from Authorization is important to the development of user flows that truly scale. In addition, allowing for both Authentication and Authorization in the same flow will streamline federated identity experiences.

As a community member of the OpenID Foundation board, I will work to ensure both technical excellence in the specifications and broad adoption of the OpenID protocols.

For broad adoption of OpenID Connect and Account Chooser, we need have deployment by early adopters as well as show business value to both Identity Providers and Relying Parties. In addition, we need to define best practices for new user flows introduced by identity federation such as account recovery, temporary access (when the user's IdP is "down") and forgotten IdP. These are areas of focus for me in the coming year.

To vote just click here!

OpenID Foundation Elections in Progress

The election of two new Community Board members for the OpenID Foundation is now in progress. The current list of candidates includes:

• Axel Nennker
• George Fletcher <-- That's me :)
  
• Greg Keegstra
• David Marceau
• Patrice Vuillard
• Sébastien Brault
• Yosef Vuillard

If you are an OpenID Foundation member, please log into the OpenID Foundation and exercise your right vote! You can easily sign up for an individual membership for only $25 US.

I'm excited about OpenID's future with the release of the OpenID Connect implementor's draft specs. This body of work is important for moving OpenID from just a federated authentication solution to one that can solve many identity authentication and authorization use cases. These use cases are not limited just to non-risk transactions but can cover higher levels of assurance as well.

Adoption is going to be critical in the next two years and that's one of the reasons I'm running for one of the available board seats. Adoption is more than just OpenID Connect implementations; adoption includes moving beyond low-risk transactions into higher value use cases and really providing convenience and security to consumers. Whether this is a goal that can be accomplished in the next 2 years remains to be seen, but it's a goal worth shooting for.

Of course I'd appreciate your vote!

Running for an OpenID Foundation Community Board Seat

I'm excited to announce that I am running for one of the available OpenID Foundation Community Board seats. While I've been a long time advocate of OpenID and open identity solutions in general, this is my first time seeking to serve the identity community is such a role. My self-nomination is now up in the OpenID Foundation Membership area. If you are so inclined, I'd greatly appreciate your "seconds" to make me an official nominee and of course your votes in the upcoming elections. :-) Here is my self-nomination statement:

I am an advocate of open identity solutions for the Internet and I believe that OpenID Connect has the opportunity to be a key identity protocol for the Web. 

I have a long history with OpenID, starting with AOL (my employer) being one of the first major identity providers to support OpenID 1.0. I contributed to the OpenID 2.0 specification along with a number of the OpenID 2.0 extensions. I’m now an active contributor to the OpenID Connect specifications. In addition, I have experience participating in a number of industry standards organizations (OIDF, IETF, OASIS, Kantara Initiative) working on identity related protocols and specifications. 

As a member of the OpenID Foundation Board, I will work to ensure both technical excellence in the specifications and broad adoption of the OpenID protocols. 

Thanks,
George

Facebook Registration Tool

The new Facebook registration service has created quite the "buzz". I have to commend Facebook on doing a great job of making it really simple for sites to manage registrations (just as they did with identity federation). I like the user experience; both for the user and for the integrating site.

However, for relying parties supporting 3rd party identity providers I do have some concerns regarding leveraging the Facebook registration UI for all users.

1. What happens if the user chooses to clear the form and enters new data? If the site requests password data as part of registration for these users using the "

   <code>{"name":"password",   "view":"not_prefilled"}</code>

   " option, when the user comes back to the site, where do they enter their password? How does the site instruct the user that when they come back to the site, they should use the site specific login form, not the Facebook login form?
   
2. For users who choose not to register for Facebook, but do want to access the site, where are their login credentials stored? If the site doesn't request password as part of the registration process, is Facebook asking for authentication credentials and storing them (along with which sites the user has logged into)? From working through the documentation, I believe Facebook handles all authentication (even if not storing the registration data) and provides sites with a UID (unique identifier). Effectively, Facebook is a federated identity provider for all users.
3. Supporting other federated identity providers becomes confusing. The relying party will have to support two registration forms; one for Facebook users and one for other identity providers. For example, I don't see a way for the relying party to use the Facebook registration UI for a user logging in with their Twitter credentials.
   

In the end, for sites that only support Facebook as their external identity provider, this is a great tool. For sites that support identity providers other than Facebook, the benefit is only recognized for Facebook account holders.

Facebook, Registration, Authentication

Privacy across Social Network aggregation

Social Network aggregation is a great personal service that allows me to see updates from all my social networks in one place. There are a number of services that provide this functionality: chi.mp and AOL Lifestream to name two. As long as I'm the only one viewing these aggregations, there are no privacy concerns.

However, the problem arises when content is shared (cross-posted) between social networks and then re-aggregated by the social aggregation service. Take the following scenario as one possible use case.

Alice participates in 3 social networks, statii (a real time micro blogging site), snaps (a photo sharing site), and frendz (a social network of my personal friends). In addition, Alice uses a social network aggregation site called socialview to give her a global view of all her social network activity. All of these social networks allow Alice to establish connections with her friends within those networks. Each of the social networks has it's own privacy mechanisms that allows Alice to share information publicly, or just with a certain set of friends. Even socialview allows Alice to establish relationships with other socialview users and share their aggregated social network activity streams. In addition, socialview allows Alice to cross-post status updates to both statii and frendz.

In this example, all of Alice's micro blog updates to statii are public. In addition, most of the photos she uploads to snaps are also public. On frendz, Alice is a little more careful and only shares information with friends. She does allow friends-of-friends to view her updates and any comments her friends leave.

Now, let's say that Alice uses socialview to post a status update to both statii and frendz. Let's also assume that Alice has decided that all her updates originating from socialview should be public. When Alice's status update appears in frendz, her friend Bob thinks it's relevant and leaves a comment in frendz on her status. Then Socialview, during it's normal aggregation cycle, sees the new comment from Bob and adds it to Alice's aggregated view.



This is where it finally gets interesting. Should Bob's comment be made public (given that Alice's privacy settings at socialview state that all her posts are public, and Bob is commenting on a "public" post?) or should his comment be visible only to Alice (because Bob didn't know he was commenting on a public post).

What I think is missing is a "visibility" scope attribute that needs to be attached to the activity as it navigates across social networks. In the above contrived example, this would allow frendz to make it clear to Bob that Alice's status is really public. It would also allow socialview to honor Bob's privacy settings that he only shares comments with friends when aggregating his comment back into Alice's aggregated view.

Activity Streams, Privacy, Social Networks, Aggregation