I thought: I could put together a quick blog post linking to some of the blogs which I follow, and spend a little time trying to fill gaps in the list. But while doing a little searching I found the Planet Identity blogroll (which I'd not seen before) and 360tek's list of blogs. Nothing I could post would be anything like as comprehensive. But there's still scope for a post, though...
Planet Identity aggregates over 170 blogs, with about 30 on 360tek's list most of which are on the Planet Identity list). I presume the former is no longer updated (it's on an old Sun server, not moved to Oracle). Blogs tend to be evanescent, and it's no surprise that some of the links in the blogroll are dead, or that others have not been updated in over two years. Many of the corporate bloggers have been amalgamated into a single company blog, which suggests to me some developing maturity in the identity market - these companies are making themselves more "corporate", which unfortunately often makes the blogs less interesting. A few of the blogs listed are inaccessible to me as someone pretty much restricted to English language writing, to my shame. My interests are also pretty much UK centred, and I'm not particularly into the latest marketing release from commercial vendors - mainly because getting identity management right is at least as much about good business processes as it is about technology. I'll just list some of the best of those which seem to be live (and which I didn't already know - or did know, but had just been too lazy to pick up and follow).
Where the blog author (if a single person) is also on twitter, I have listed their twitter ID as well as the blog URL.
Identity Networks: The blog of Ingrid Melve, Federation Manager for Feide - a FAM slant, and well worth reading (one of the blogs I really should have been following already)
Identity Woman: Although recent posts are taken up with the naming policies of Google+ (the spate of discussion over pseudonyms on the network being sparked off because Google would not allow an account in the name of Identity Woman), there is a lot of interesting material on this blog about user-centric identity.
Identity Happens: A great blog which is more technical than most of the others in this list. Not updated all that frequently.
Racingsnake: Robin Wilton's personal blog, focusing mainly on public policy relating to security and IAM. He also blogs at Gartner.
Ian Yip's Security and Identity Thought Stream: Good stuff here, too; interest in why technical security problems arise in the first place from Ian Yip.
I use Akregator to read most of the blogs I follow, and I have a fair number of Identity and Security blogs in there. A lot of security bloggers talk about identity - it has become massively important in IT security now that people have started to realise just how insecure most systems become if identity management is compromised.
eFoundations: Not all IAM, but always interesting blog from Pete Johnston and Andy Powell at Eduserv.
UK Access Management Focus (formerly JISC Access Management Team blog): Essential reading if you want to know what's happening in IAM in UK higher education. Maintained by Nicole Harris, a former LSE colleague of mine.
Kim Cameron's Identity Blog: thoughtful posting about identity (from, unsurprisingly, Kim Cameron), most recently (at the time of writing) about how disintermediation might affect identity.
Light Blue Touchpaper The blog of the security research group at Cambridge University: they often have something interesting, or even controversial to say (particularly if you believe in bank security). Posters here include Steven Murdoch.
Talking Identity, from Nishant Kaushik: He works for Identropy, so some content is cross posted from their corporate blog. Sensible and pretty authoritative stuff here (and, indeed, there).
Stephan's Ramblings: Another former colleague, who blogs about security generally.
Schneier on Security: Bruce Scheier, security guru (author of one of the best technical books on cryptography), describes himself as "head curmudgeon at the table". Fascinating comment, and a weekly squid-related post.
Naked Security, the Sophos blog on IT security, has timely posts on most current security stories. Perhaps less identity content than the ones above, but helps to keep up to date.
Not all essential reading comes in blog form, even in 2011, though these web sites also provide feeds.
The security tag at Slashdot Any Slashdot story tagged as "security" can be seen here, which includes just about any IAM related discussion on the place to go for computer geekery.
Security coverage at The Register Some may not like the jokey tone of "El Reg" (as it calls itself), but they cover a lot of interesting stories in an idiosyncratic way. The Identity stories have a subject feed here.
Electronic Frontier Foundation: Fighting for rights in the digital world, many of which have some connection to identity.
I follow some other relevant people on twitter:
Robert Garskamp, of IDentity.Next
Christopher Brown, of JISC - eResearch Programme Manager responsible for the Access & Identity Management programme
Rhys Smith, of Cardiff University and JANET, who worked on the Identity Project and the Identity Toolkit with me
John Chapman, also at JANET
RL "Bob" Morgan, University of Washington and Shibboleth (most people involved in Shibboleth seem not to tweet or blog)
I hope this list is useful - but I've probably missed some obvious and interesting blogs...
Tuesday, 25 October 2011
Saturday, 1 October 2011
Identity and Access Management and the Technology Outlook for UK Tertiary Education 2011-2016 (Part Three)
Recently, the NMC Horizon project published its report, Technology Outlook for UK Tertiary Education 2011-2016: An NMC Horizon Report Regional Analysis, produced in collaboration with CETIS and UKOLN. The last ten years have seen massive changes in the ways in which UK tertiary education institutions handle authentication, identity, and access controls, and I would like to take a look at each of the technologies it mentions and discuss whether their adoption will force or encourage further change.
The report groups technologies into three groups of four, the first group being those which are imminent (time to adoption one year or less), then those which are likely to be adopted in two to three years, and finally those which the contributors to the report expect to be adopted in four to five years. I will devote a single post to each group of four. This is post two of the three; go to post one, post two.
Augmented Reality
This particular technology has no interesting identity component that I can see - it's just going to be the usual issues of data ownership and, possibly, privacy. However, the nature of augmented reality is such that it is likely to lead to all sorts of new applications which may have privacy issues - in particular, those which allow visitors to tag the online information to add comments, or even graffiti to the augmented presence.
Collective Intelligence
In the educational context, the key point (clear in the example project links given in the report, though strangely not actually mentioned in the main text) is curation of the collected information, as learners and researchers have a need for accuracy. This in turn necessitates some form of identity management, otherwise the curation itself will need curating. This should already be well understood, as it is crucial to much open data already available, so there will be no excuse for not managing it sensibly by 2015.
Smart Objects
This is the use of unique identifiers embedded with an object which can be used (for example) to provide a linkage to a point on the Web. The current technologies for doing this are mainly RFID tags and QR codes. The sample uses discussed in the report don't seem to me to be of huge relevance for most forms of tertiary education specifically, though they will be useful for such tasks as keeping track of sample materials in labs, or the location of medical cameras and sensors in patients. Again, there seems to be nothing much new here in terms of identity.
Telepresence
The future of video conferencing is telepresence, which has had some high profile demonstrations; the name suggests the point, which is to make it appear to each participant that the others are present at a shared conference space (which may of course be a purely virtual location). As with smart objects, I have some difficulty thinking of applications for this technology specific to the education sector (surely it isn't going to enhance remote learning all that much?). I also experienced the nightmare which was UK higher education videoconferencing about a decade ago - too little bandwidth even in the dedicated video suite needed made it unusable, less good than Skype video calls are now. And I know how difficult the Open University found it when they first made it a requirement for some of their courses for students to have access to a fairly basic standard of computer equipment. So my feeling is that the date suggested for this is rather optimistic, as institutions will be conservative about the widespread adoption of something which has high bandwidth and processing requirements without extremely clear benefits for students and researchers. Small scale adoption where it's useful to research, possibly - the final use suggested for the technology is for the exploration of locations difficult or impossible for human beings to access. Generally, though, my feeling is that the report is being optimistic over the timescale needed for the hardware and bandwidth requirements to be sufficiently easy to meet.
This is a technology with clear identity elements - the participants in a conference will be identified to be able to take part (in the main), and will be releasing large quantities of information about themselves to the other participants. That said, it seems unlikely that most uses will provide any new or even particularly unusual use cases for IAM.
General Conclusions
Overall, it seems to me that there is little which is likely to provide new challenges for IAM in the adoption of any of these technologies. However, there is ample scope for developers to get the IAM components wrong for components of both the tools needed to deliver the technology and of applications which are built to make use of them for education and research. This is especially important as many of those involved in delivering the applications and tools will not be experts in IAM themselves. We often see elementary errors in security particularly: while I was typing this, I was alerted to a blog post linking to a paper about insecurities in Chrome browser extensions - exactly the kind of problem which a software developer can create through lack of thinking through the implications of what they're doing, or by trying to re-invent the wheel because they don't know that others have done it before them.
The potential problems are compounded because the hardware being used by students and staff is going to be more and more their own rather than under the control of the institution, with all the potential for poor security as self-support becomes the norm. The multiplicity of devices and the fragmentation of the software market that it entails will make it much harder to make fixes; the days when an institution can have a "standard build" on every PC with a single supported web browser which can be updated at need from central servers are numbered. As the report concludes, "The computer is smaller, lighter, and better connected than ever before, without the need for wires or bulky peripherals. In many cases, smart phones and other mobile devices are sufficient for basic computing needs, and only specialized tasks require a keyboard, large monitor, and a mouse. Mobiles are connected to an ecosystem of applications supported by cloud computing technologies that can be downloaded and used instantly, for pennies. As the capabilities and interfaces of small computing devices improve, our ideas about when — or whether — a traditional computer is necessary are changing as well."
It is also possible that some applications built for education using these technologies could present some challenges for IAM. It seems likely that no one will now be able to predict the uses to which these technologies can be used, and I'd suspect that the most interesting uses will be ones that no one has yet invented. There may well be other technologies which will prove more revolutionary in tertiary education in the UK than any of the twelve listed here, but which we don't know about.
A common thread to many of the technologies is linking individuals or information - and sharing is obviously a potential source of privacy issues. Indeed, the tone of the report seems to suggest that within the next few years, privacy will be an outmoded idea; we will all be willing to share just about everything online. Is this true, or even likely? While naive users continue to share everything that occurs to them without caring about or understanding security settings (e.g. on Facebook), there is at least some evidence that many users are now thinking more about what they post and what it might mean for them later on, when read by a prospective employer, for example. The recent "nym wars" (usefully summarised here with discussion relevant to how privacy should be seen in the future) show that many people put a high value on privacy and the possibility of keeping a real world identity secret in particular. To the list of challenges summarised at the end of the report, I would add the investigation of the developing attitudes to privacy and how they should affect implementation and use of the technologies from this report in tertiary education.
The report groups technologies into three groups of four, the first group being those which are imminent (time to adoption one year or less), then those which are likely to be adopted in two to three years, and finally those which the contributors to the report expect to be adopted in four to five years. I will devote a single post to each group of four. This is post two of the three; go to post one, post two.
Augmented Reality
This particular technology has no interesting identity component that I can see - it's just going to be the usual issues of data ownership and, possibly, privacy. However, the nature of augmented reality is such that it is likely to lead to all sorts of new applications which may have privacy issues - in particular, those which allow visitors to tag the online information to add comments, or even graffiti to the augmented presence.
Collective Intelligence
In the educational context, the key point (clear in the example project links given in the report, though strangely not actually mentioned in the main text) is curation of the collected information, as learners and researchers have a need for accuracy. This in turn necessitates some form of identity management, otherwise the curation itself will need curating. This should already be well understood, as it is crucial to much open data already available, so there will be no excuse for not managing it sensibly by 2015.
Smart Objects
This is the use of unique identifiers embedded with an object which can be used (for example) to provide a linkage to a point on the Web. The current technologies for doing this are mainly RFID tags and QR codes. The sample uses discussed in the report don't seem to me to be of huge relevance for most forms of tertiary education specifically, though they will be useful for such tasks as keeping track of sample materials in labs, or the location of medical cameras and sensors in patients. Again, there seems to be nothing much new here in terms of identity.
Telepresence
The future of video conferencing is telepresence, which has had some high profile demonstrations; the name suggests the point, which is to make it appear to each participant that the others are present at a shared conference space (which may of course be a purely virtual location). As with smart objects, I have some difficulty thinking of applications for this technology specific to the education sector (surely it isn't going to enhance remote learning all that much?). I also experienced the nightmare which was UK higher education videoconferencing about a decade ago - too little bandwidth even in the dedicated video suite needed made it unusable, less good than Skype video calls are now. And I know how difficult the Open University found it when they first made it a requirement for some of their courses for students to have access to a fairly basic standard of computer equipment. So my feeling is that the date suggested for this is rather optimistic, as institutions will be conservative about the widespread adoption of something which has high bandwidth and processing requirements without extremely clear benefits for students and researchers. Small scale adoption where it's useful to research, possibly - the final use suggested for the technology is for the exploration of locations difficult or impossible for human beings to access. Generally, though, my feeling is that the report is being optimistic over the timescale needed for the hardware and bandwidth requirements to be sufficiently easy to meet.
This is a technology with clear identity elements - the participants in a conference will be identified to be able to take part (in the main), and will be releasing large quantities of information about themselves to the other participants. That said, it seems unlikely that most uses will provide any new or even particularly unusual use cases for IAM.
General Conclusions
Overall, it seems to me that there is little which is likely to provide new challenges for IAM in the adoption of any of these technologies. However, there is ample scope for developers to get the IAM components wrong for components of both the tools needed to deliver the technology and of applications which are built to make use of them for education and research. This is especially important as many of those involved in delivering the applications and tools will not be experts in IAM themselves. We often see elementary errors in security particularly: while I was typing this, I was alerted to a blog post linking to a paper about insecurities in Chrome browser extensions - exactly the kind of problem which a software developer can create through lack of thinking through the implications of what they're doing, or by trying to re-invent the wheel because they don't know that others have done it before them.
The potential problems are compounded because the hardware being used by students and staff is going to be more and more their own rather than under the control of the institution, with all the potential for poor security as self-support becomes the norm. The multiplicity of devices and the fragmentation of the software market that it entails will make it much harder to make fixes; the days when an institution can have a "standard build" on every PC with a single supported web browser which can be updated at need from central servers are numbered. As the report concludes, "The computer is smaller, lighter, and better connected than ever before, without the need for wires or bulky peripherals. In many cases, smart phones and other mobile devices are sufficient for basic computing needs, and only specialized tasks require a keyboard, large monitor, and a mouse. Mobiles are connected to an ecosystem of applications supported by cloud computing technologies that can be downloaded and used instantly, for pennies. As the capabilities and interfaces of small computing devices improve, our ideas about when — or whether — a traditional computer is necessary are changing as well."
It is also possible that some applications built for education using these technologies could present some challenges for IAM. It seems likely that no one will now be able to predict the uses to which these technologies can be used, and I'd suspect that the most interesting uses will be ones that no one has yet invented. There may well be other technologies which will prove more revolutionary in tertiary education in the UK than any of the twelve listed here, but which we don't know about.
A common thread to many of the technologies is linking individuals or information - and sharing is obviously a potential source of privacy issues. Indeed, the tone of the report seems to suggest that within the next few years, privacy will be an outmoded idea; we will all be willing to share just about everything online. Is this true, or even likely? While naive users continue to share everything that occurs to them without caring about or understanding security settings (e.g. on Facebook), there is at least some evidence that many users are now thinking more about what they post and what it might mean for them later on, when read by a prospective employer, for example. The recent "nym wars" (usefully summarised here with discussion relevant to how privacy should be seen in the future) show that many people put a high value on privacy and the possibility of keeping a real world identity secret in particular. To the list of challenges summarised at the end of the report, I would add the investigation of the developing attitudes to privacy and how they should affect implementation and use of the technologies from this report in tertiary education.
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