Trends Report

OpenID Connect Heralds The "Identity Singularity"

Prepare For Cloud Security Improvements, Along With A Tincture Of Disruption

October 26th, 2011
Eve Maler, null
Eve Maler
With contributors:
Stephanie Balaouras , Andras Cser , Kelley Mak

Summary

Security professionals responsible for diverse types of access management across cloud services, devices, and populations have to pull off a neat trick: control access requests that routinely cross domain boundaries. Federated identity techniques such as web single sign-on help to solve these problems but require "extreme interoperability." To secure a full set of such scenarios today, security architects must often design Rube Goldberg-type devices that translate between standards optimized for subsets of needs, such as B2B (business-to-business) or B2C (business-to-consumer). The new suite of OpenID Connect and JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) Web Token specifications brings another round of standards disruption but also promises a no-compromises approach to highly distributed identity and access management (IAM).

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