Mike Jones: self-issued

Last night OSIS and the Burton Group held the third in a series of user-centric identity Interop events where companies and projects building user-centric identity software components came together and tested the interoperation of their software together. Following on the Interops at IIW in May and Catalyst in June, the participants continued their joint work of ensuring that the identity software we’re all building works great together.

This Interop had a broader scope along several dimensions than the previous ones:

• We welcomed new participants a.t.e Software, Fraunhofer, JanRain, LinkSafe, ooTao, Sun Microsystems, Siemens, and ThoughtWorks.
• We tested interoperation of OpenID software (including i-name software) in addition to Information Card software.
• Several kinds of interop between Information Card and OpenID software were demonstrated, including:
  1. OpenID providers implementing the OpenID phishing-resistant authentication specification using Information Cards to enable phishing-resistant sign-in to OpenIDs, and
  2. using OpenID Information Cards to supply OpenIDs to OpenID relying parties.
• Unlike previous Interops, the endpoints and testing results are all publicly available so that others can benefit from them.
• Many of the participants have committed to keeping their sites up beyond Catalyst to allow for continued public interop testing. For instance, Microsoft’s sites will remain up at http://www.federatedidentity.net/.

An excerpt from Bob Blakley’s insightful-as-always commentary on the Interop is:

The participants have posted their results on the wiki, and a few words are in order about these results. The first thing you’ll notice is that there are a significant number of “failure” and “issue” results. This is very good news for two reasons.

The first reason it’s good news is that it means enough new test cases were designed for this interop to uncover new problems. What you don’t see in the matrix is that when testing began, there were even more failures – which means that a lot of the new issues identified during the exercise have already been fixed.

The second reason the “failure” and “issue” results are good news is that they’re outnumbered by the successes. When you consider that the things tested in Barcelona were all identified as problems at the previous interop, you’ll get an idea of how much work has been done by the OSIS community in only 4 months to improve interoperability and agree on standards of component behavior.

Be sure to read his full post for more details on what the participants accomplished together. And of course, this isn’t the end of the story. An even wider and deeper Interop event is planned for the RSA Conference in April 2008. Great progress on building the Internet identity layer together!

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