Brennan’s Blog

I have been watching this bubble up slowly over the past 8 years. My first exposure to a form of identity management was PGP which has never become a widespread technology despite the efforts of many. PGP is an implementation of public key encryption just like SSL which has been a part of web browsers nearly from the beginning when Netscape developed SSL 3.0 over 10 years ago. We have used SSL to buy products do our banking online ever since.

These days with identity theft and phishing exploits there is a very real need to finally create a functional solution for identity management. A couple of months ago Microsoft released their branded solution Cardspace with .NET 3.0 which has been included with Vista. And this week Microsoft put their weight behind OpenID. (see OpenID Gets a Boost From Microsoft ) All of the recent activity is adding up to identity management finally taking off.

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Identity management has been coming into vogue lately. The push is going towards distributed single sign-on and I believe this trend is largely due to the rise of web services, AJAX and the real world application of mashups. And as existing web powerhouses like Yahoo! have acquired other web properties, such as Flickr.com there has been a real need to integrate the identity systems.

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