2008 Q1 Report OSIS

Successes

• The OSIS wiki pages were moved to Identity Commons.
• Weekly interoperability meetings were held to prepare for the I3 Event.
• A google-group (http://tinyurl.com/2n84tt) user-centric identity interop was created

Following on the planning for I3 begun in 2007 Q4:

• RSA Conference planners were solicited and agreed to an interoperability event at RSA Conference, April 7 - 11 Moscone Convention Center, San Francisco, California
• A detailed plan was drafted and reviewed for specific feature, function, and condition handling for information cards involving Identity Providers, Selectors, and Relying Parties; as well as for OpenID between Identity Providers and Relying Parties.
• An automated database system was developed to make generation of test matrices automatic between all participant solutions. Specific tests for each solution type were listed.
• Work was begun to create automated test suites to enable testing against interoperability features. This work needs to be completed in Q2.
• It was highly encouraged to keep the endpoints up continuously so that interoperability tests could occur at any time.
• 57 projects and company participanting in I3 (33 companies, 24 projects) consisted of:

• • 7 information card identity selectors
  • 3 information card browser add-ons.
  • 10 information cardidentity providers
  • 34 information card relying parties
  • 10 OpenID providers
  • 13 OpenID relying parties

(Note that some projects/companies provided more than 1 solution.)

• The actual interop at RSA was held April 8 and April 9 from 11AM - 6PM
• OSIS provided the venue for an OSIS Steering Committee meeting held Monday April 7, and an OpenID BoF meeting held Wednesday April 9.

This event was done without the infastructure support provided for the first two interops by The Burton Group.

The final phase of I3 will be held later in April at the 2nd European Identity Conference in Munich April 22 - 25

Breakdowns

Of the breakdowns that were reported in Q4 2007:

• we improved the reliability of the wiki by moving it to a new location.
• we created better collaboration tools (the automated test matrices) (created by P. Dingle and funded by Microsoft)
• we created a better mailing list through googlegroups. (set by C. Andres)
• we have a consistent dial-in number for Conference Calls (courtesy of Novell)

In this quarter, significant investments by Novell, Microsoft, Parity Communications, and the newly formed Information Card Foundation made it possible to conduct a successful interop, and build key base components for interop evolution.

As anticipated, we have witnessed how much more we can get done when there is a core group with sufficient resources. Without that, breakdowns are inevitable.

Requests

Request: Consistent Interoperability Messaging, Cooperative Interoperability Events

There were 3 interop events held at RSA Conference. In addition to OSIS,

• Liberty/Concordia held an interoperability event covering 2 SAML use cases
• OASIS held an XACML interop event showing a single application running across approx. 1 dozen different platforms.

At the OSIS Steering Committee meeting, invited guests, Roger Sullivan, President of the Liberty Alliance and Bill Washburn, Executive Director of the Open ID Foundation, voiced strong endorsement for ensuring that the public perception for these interops will be accurately seen as complementary (not competing) efforts. Charles Andres, Executive Director of the newly formed (but unannounced) Information Card Foundation, declared that the ICF would work closely with OIDF and Liberty/Concordia on any public positioning announcements made by any of these organizations to ensure consistent public positioning.

There was general consensus that customers need to believe that these efforts are complementary across all platforms, or buying decisions will be delayed.

For example, with the 3 interop events, no overlap occurred -- Liberty/Concordia was a deep dive into 2 specific use cases. OASIS XACML showed a deeper dive into a specific application across 12 platforms. OSIS showed depth and breadth with over 160 tests interacting between 57 platforms. Each of these efforts were complementary and needed to advance the state of the industry as fast as possible.

Announcements

The last portion of I3 will be an interoperability event held at the 2nd European Identity Conference.