What does an Identity Hub look like?

A question I’ve been getting lately is “what does an Identity Hub look like?” As regular readers will know, the Identity Hub/Identity Bus is a topic we’ve talked a lot about recently (click here if you’re not familiar with the topic). So far, though, there’s nothing even close “in the field.” There are a couple of things, both still theoretical at this point, that encompass some of the functionality, though. One I’ve mentioned before and one I should have.

I told you a bit about the Identity Oracle (“How the identity oracle could solve the privacy problem”) last fall. It’s the concept that the Burton Group’s Bob Blakley has proposed – primarily as a privacy-protecting scheme, but with implications for the Identity hub. In essence, the Oracle takes a question/request from a party that’s looking to acquire information then formulates a reply based on identity data it has at its command. The best example is a person wishing to purchase an alcoholic beverage, the seller queries the oracle which replies either “yes” or “no” that the potential purchaser satisfies the requirements (both legal and financial, and possibly social) to complete the transaction. All without revealing any specific data. This is, in effect, a data transformation – the entity’s age, place of residence, credit score/bank balance – perhaps religious preferences – are transformed into a simple yes/no response. That’s one aspect of what I envision the Identity Hub doing.

Beyond data transformation, though, there’s also protocol transformation. This is something the Concordia Project is involved in.

Last week at the Internet Identity Workshop I had the privilege of sitting in a session on Concordia presented by the “protocol princess” herself, Eve Maler (her day job is Technology Director at Sun, but that’s so mundane) and realized that this was a step on the road to the protocol transformation part of the Identity Hub. Concordia (born from the Liberty Alliance, but now operating independently) doesn’t create products or specifications. What it does, so far, is to create “use cases.” Then members can build or modify products and services that solve the problems described in a use case.

As the Project defines itself:

“Project Concordia is a global initiative designed to drive interoperability across identity protocols in use today. It does this by soliciting and defining real-world use cases and requirements for the usage of multiple identity protocols together in various deployment scenarios, and encouraging and facilitating the creation of protocol solutions in the appropriate homes for those technologies.

“In general, Concordia participants take on new work when a deployer (of any size) presents a problem that existing identity protocols do not solve, ideally a problem that benefits from greater interoperability between protocols. The participants then work with a wide swath of the Internet community to document one or more resulting use cases, requirements, and interop scenarios. All Concordia output is recorded on the wiki. Use cases and requirements may then be used as input to a technical group where relevant specification development occurs. When starting this process, Concordia participants are not biasing themselves by looking at what technical group will ultimately take on the resulting work.”

I’m sure there are other projects out there which can contribute to the Identity Hub and I’ll talk about them as I become aware of them. Hopefully, you’ll tell me about any you may know of, too.