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Items tagged openid, security

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New authentication schemes such as OpenID, or Microsoft’s CardSpace, may help as adoption increases. These systems make it possible to register for one site using credentials verified by another. Instead of having many sites with poor verification procedures, the internet could have a few sites with strong verification procedures, that are then used by others. The advantage for the user is that they no longer have to jump through multiple hoops for each new site they encounter.

Tim Anderson (in the Guardian) # 29th August 2008, 10:01 am

OpenID is a new and maturing technology, and HealthVault is frankly the most sensitive relying party in the OpenID ecosystem. It just makes sense for us to take our first steps carefully.

Sean Nolan # 24th June 2008, 6:29 pm

The point of “Open” in OpenID

TechCrunch report that Microsoft are accepting OpenID for their new HealthVault site, but with a catch: you can only use OpenIDs from two providers: Trustbearer (who offer two-factor authentication using a hardware token) and Verisign. "Whatever happened to the Open in OpenID?", asks TechCrunch’s Jason Kincaid.

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OpenID phishing demo (via) A demonstration of the OpenID man-in-the-middle phishing attack. idproxy.net OpenIDs are immune to this particular variant due to the landing page not asking for your password (the phishing site could still provide their own redesigned landing page and hope users don’t notice though). # 28th May 2008, 8:09 am

PayPal Plans to Ban Unsafe Browsers. At first I thought they were going to encourage real anti-phishing features in browsers, which would be a big win for OpenID... but it turns out they’re just requiring EV SSL certificates which have been proven not to actually work. # 19th April 2008, 10:45 am

openid.yahoo.com. Yahoo!’s human readable guide to OpenID, complete with tour. It looks like they’re relying on the “sign-in seal” to protect against phishing. # 17th January 2008, 2:35 pm

In my opinion it is better to compare OpenIDs to credit cards. [...] Just as a credit card company may place limit on the level of guarantee, web sites are at liberty to restrict the OpenIDs it will recognize and accept. Just as many of us carry more than one credit card, we may have multiple OpenIDs and use them for different occasions. Just as some department store credit card is not accepted outside of that store, it is possible that IDs issued by some OpenID providers may not be accepted by some sites.

Rao Aswath # 10th January 2008, 6:50 pm

MyOpenID adds Information Card Support. First client SSL certificates, now Information Cards. MyOpenID is certainly taking browser-based phishing solutions seriously. # 18th October 2007, 9:10 pm

Cronto. I saw a demo of this the other day—it’s a neat anti-phishing scheme that also protects against man in the middle attacks. It works using challenge/response: an image is shown which embeds a signed transaction code; the user then uses an application on their laptop or mobile phone to decode the image and enters the resulting code back in to the online application. # 2nd October 2007, 1:14 am

Designing for a security breach

User account breaches are inevitable. We should take that in to account when designing our applications.

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VeriSign’s SeatBelt OpenID plugin for Firefox. The first good example of browser integration for OpenID. It catches phishing attempts by watching out for rogue OpenID consumers that don’t redirect to the right place. # 17th August 2007, 5:37 pm

Solving the OpenID phishing problem

Most of the arguments I hear against OpenID are based on mis-understandings of the specification, but there is one that can’t be ignored: OpenID is extremely vulnerable to phishing.

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