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Persona is distributed. Today.

identity.mozilla.com

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Re: Persona is distributed. Today.

#151

Post by drdaeman »

mook wrote: post #106
cromwellian wrote: post #27

I haven't look at the specs deeply, but it would be nice to have a system that did not need any kind of server at all, but the browser itself could be the Persona identity provider. The actual local data needed to pull it off could be replicated (encrypted) to cloud storage so it would work across all your devices and browsers, but the actual profile data itself would never be readable by the servers. I started looki…

That would end up requiring your identity to be a key of some sort, though, since ultimately the thing you're logging into needs to check _something_. Email-like things are useful because somebody has to control the domain; if you don't have that, it's harder to establish something. Of course, you can say things like "Hi, I'm random prime number 534473", but that's much less memorable...

The displayed name is a bit different concept from identity. It's like a server and it's DNS name.

The point is, nothing prevents the site from knowing me as 70BD6432E50DFB65FF679B32364C3C7840DE4453, but displaying me everywhere as "Aleksey".

Re: Persona is distributed. Today.

#152

Post by teach »

rfk wrote: post #83
JoshTriplett wrote: post #14

Currently wondering the most sensible approach to make a single-user website support this protocol, so that I can make my email address (the only valid email address at my domain) support Persona natively. I don't really want to have to set up a username/password system with a single user. I'd almost prefer to manually hand my identity's private key to each browser I want to use. I wonder how much work it would take…

I recently set up my personal domain as an identity provider, using static HTML/javascript files and a bit of crypto: https://www.rfk.id.au/blog/entry/persona-identity-provider/ There are some things to be mindful of w.r.t. security in this approach, but it seems to work very nicely for me.

This is a ridiculously helpful blog post and it's right up my alley. I have a single-user (vanity) domain, and hate futzing with databases.

The those that haven't read this link: his implementation is done 100% with static files. Clever and looks secure enough to me (though I'm no crypto guy).

Re: Persona is distributed. Today.

#153

Post by epa »

MatthewPhillips wrote: post #121
epa wrote: post #80

It's hard not to respect Mozilla in 2013. I know i've personally moved away from Chrome back to FireFox. Mozilla seems like a young Google in a way.

Same here, switched to Aurora permanently and haven't had any issues. Like that it looks native to the OS you are using. And had forgotten how much better the awesomebar is.

Thanks for sharing, did not realize ver20 was in testing.

Re: Persona is distributed. Today.

#154

Post by saljam »

drdaeman wrote: post #140
saljam wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. To me, Webfinger+OpenID seems like a more sensible solution. At least in principle. The only downside is that OpenID lacks BrowserID's privacy bits. http://code.google.com/p/webfinger/

I believe http://gpgauth.org/ is better (except that it lacks strong community and PR from browser vendors). No need for per-site passwords (the only passwords are master password and, possibly, secret for key escrow). No need for any discovery and third parties, as you're identified by your own key, which contains a name (or nickname or whatever) — the most natural approach to identities (which has minor problem wit…

Wow, I remember reading about foaf+ssl years ago. Glad to see it's still alive!
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