Towards the end of 2019, I was invited to deliver a keynote at the OpenID Foundation Summit in Japan. At a very personal level, the January 2020 Summit was an opportunity to spend time with dear friends from around the world. It would be the last time I saw Kim Cameron in person. It would include a dinner with the late Vittorio Bertocci. And it was my last “big” trip before the COVID lock down.
I was talking to a long time competitor/colleague/client/friend this week about identity governance and a variety of other identity topics. We were commenting that in some regards access certification and access policies have been stuck in bubble of amber: not a lot of innovation save the addition of some cluster analysis (marketed as AI.) In the course of the conversation I remember that a long time ago I had written a piece on the use of negative policy spaces for access governance. My buddy thought it would be fun to dig it up a repost it. So of I went to find this…
What follows is a take on what I learned as Salesforce moved to require all of its customers to use MFA. There’s plenty more left on the cutting room floor but it will definitely give you a flavor for the experience. If you don’t want to read all this you can check out the version I delivered at Identiverse 2022.
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Thank you.
It is an honor and a privilege to be here on the first day of Identiverse. I want to thank Andi and the entire program team for allowing me to speak to you today.
Reification. I learned that word from Kim. In the immediate next breath he said from the stage that he was told not everyone knew what reify meant and that he would use a more approachable word: “thingify.” And therein I learned another lesson from Kim about how to present to an audience.
My memories of Kim come in three phases: Kim as Legend, Kim as Colleague, and Kim as Human, and with each phase came new things to learn.
Some on the next 10-ish years in identity management.
[This was originally written in December 2019: pre-pandemic, pre-US presidential election, pre-George Floyd. Truly, it was written in the “Before Times.” I thought about updating this before posting but that felt wrong - somehow dishonest. So here is the lightly touched up text of my talk which was given first in Tokyo at the OpenID Foundation Summit and then again as part of the all-virtual Identiverse. If you want to skip the text and go straight to the video, you can!
[What follows are some thoughts on usernames and identifiers. This was an extremely fun talk to put together. Many thanks as always to everyone who helped improve this talk including Chuck Mortimore and George Fletcher. – IG Sept 3 2019. If you don’t feel like reading everything, you check me out giving this talk at Identiverse in June of 2019.]
Usernames. They are the most forgotten, the most overlooked thing in our industry. They are, as we would say in the US, the “Gen X” of identity management. They show up; they do their job; they don’t get any credit. In fact, they do not get the same attention that their big brother “Password” and their little sister “Password-less” get. Instead, usernames do their job without thanks or recognition. But failing to pay attention to usernames can have major negative impacts to both B2B and B2C scenarios.
To grow your skills, you must know your skills. Problem is, that’s harder than it sounds, if only because we rarely carve time out of our hectic lives to do so. Might as well use these next few minutes to do so, and this post will give give a technique to help you along. We cannot think about our skills in a vacuum. It’s a well researched fact that humans are horrible at assessing their own skills. We often inflate skills we do not have. We downplay skills we do have. Simply put, we lie to ourselves about the strength of our skills. We need inner honesty. We need outside voices. We need feedback… in order to examine these skills we have and those we don’t.
A few months ago, I had the honor and pleasure to sit down with one of the most awesome people in Privacy, Michelle Dennedy, Chief Privacy Officer at Cisco, and record one of her Privacy Sigma Riders podcasts. We were in Austin. We were pumped to finally get together. We were heavily caffeinated. And we didn’t actually record anything… save for the last 25 secs of what was a 45 minute conversation. Fail… fail… fail!
(Thanks to Kim Cameron for prompting me to write this down. Special thanks to Chuck Mortimore for his insight and probing questions and who helped me improve this.) In the identity industry, there’s been a lot hype these days around self-sovereign identity. The latest permutation in the quest for user-centric identity, self-sovereign revisits the laudable goal of enabling people to be in better control of how information about them passes to enterprises and organizations (but now with added blockchain.) To be clear, increased individual control is an important goal and one that incredibly sharp people have been working on for 15+ years, going back to InfoCard and Higgins. Before I discuss why self-sovereign has a real chance at widespread adoption, it’s important to understand why identity technologies and approaches get adopted in the first place. At least, three things are required:
In Part 1 of this series, I discussed the types of attackers who can weaponize your identity systems, use them to cause harm. In Part 2, I introduced the design goals of the Maturity Model as well as the disciplines needed to implement the Maturity Model. In this post, I’ll discuss each of the 5 levels of the Maturity Model and controls you should put in place to achieve those levels.
This level is table stakes. It optimizes your organization’s existing security controls for identity systems. I believe it helps make compliance with things like GDPR easier but it is in no way a “cure all” for regulatory burdens. To achieve Level 1, you’ll need a combination of access control, data protection, and audit: