OpenID and Zero Signon

The Bandwagon

There has been a lot of news stories about companies supporting OpenID lately. On one hand it makes me happy that OpenID is taking off, but on the other hand, I find it sad that it took so long for Google/Yahoo/etc to jump on the bandwagon — Discovr ¹ supported OpenID back in 2005 when it was still a baby capstone project².

Zero Signon

For anyone interested in Zero Signon, please take a look at Zero Sign On - 1 better or Infinitely better than Single Sign On? by Dr. Nic. It's an interesting combination of the new (OpenID) and the old (Client Certificates).

This “picture of the future” was actually added to our browsers in the 90s. Netscape and MSIE3.0 both had it.

“It” is Client Certificates, and to me to means “never logging on with username/password NOR OpenID ever again”. Zero Sign On. It must be better than the much-targetted Single Sign On.

I tested it out and it worked as expected. Brilliant! I was also able to export the certificate from Firefox into my OS X Keychain without any trouble whatsoever.

I for one am excited by the newly-found momentum of OpenID and the use of this old-new technology.

Strong Authentication

With my renewed interest I went searching for all-things-openid and stumbled upon OpenID with Strong Authentication, which allows you to use USB dongles/other-authentication-devices to authenticate via OpenID, an idea Gordy had the other day³

OpenID @ The Null Pointer

I also enabled OpenID on The Null Pointer. Most people comment simply by typing in their name/url, but I figured OpenID couldn't hurt. It also allows me to sign in to The Null Pointer as thenullpointer.net, which is pretty cool.

1. A geospatial awareness application that Gordy and I wrote in 2005/2006 [↩]
2. A quick test indicates that it still works! yay! [↩]
3. A discussion over IM or at the office [↩]