The OpenID community has worked long and hard to make ad-hoc logins possible on the web. Part of that process has been experiments with a number of different technologies and approaches. Below I make my own proposal for how to handle ad-hoc logins on the Internet using OAuth WRAP and my own spin on Finger. I offer this up as food for thought. (more...)

Those folks of a certain age will remember the finger command/protocol which allowed one to look up information about a person based just on their login identifier. This command was extremely useful even if it had some troubling security and privacy implications. Efforts are underway to create a Web Finger but for reasons I’ve previously discussed I think the underlying technologies for those efforts are sub-optimal. So in this article I propose what I think is a much simpler approach. My motivation for caring is that I think having a finger service will make permissioning systems much more useful (see here and here). (more...)

In a previous article I talked about adding a profile to OAuth WRAP that would enable users to ask for or grant permissions to each other. In this article I show that an OAuth WRAP profile to handle granting permissions only needs two request/response pairs. I then show that an OAuth WRAP profile to handle asking for permissions only needs one additional exchange. (more...)