As the Digital Economy Ramps Up, Expect a New Identity Management Vision to Leapfrog Passwords

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how enterprises need new standards to deal with a lagging effort on identity and access management as the world moves to the cloud and mobile devices.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Ping Identity.

Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you're listening to BriefingsDirect.

Gardner

Today, we present a sponsored podcast discussion on why a stubborn speed bump for the digital economy has resisted fixing for so long. We're referring to the outdated use of passwords and limited identity-management solutions that hamper getting all of our devices, cloud services, enterprise applications, and needed data to work together in anything approaching harmony. 

The past three years have seen a huge uptick in the number and types of mobile devices, online services, and media. Yet, we're seemingly stuck with 20-year-old authentication and identity-management mechanisms -- mostly based on passwords.

The resulting chasm between what we have and what we need for access control and governance spells ongoing security lapses, privacy worries, and a detrimental lack of interoperability among cross-domain cloud services. So, while a new generation of standards and technologies has emerged, a new vision is also required to move beyond the precarious passel of passwords that each of us seems to use all the time.

The fast approaching Cloud Identity Summit 2014 this July gives us a chance to recheck some identity-management premises -- and perhaps step beyond the conventional to a more functional mobile future. To help us define these new best ways to manage identities and access control in the cloud and mobile era, please join me in welcoming our guest, Andre Durand, CEO of Ping Identity. Welcome, Andre.

Andre Durand: Thank you, Dana. Happy to be here.

Gardner: The Cloud Identity Summit is coming up, and at the same time, we're finding that this digital economy is not really reaching its potential. There seems to be this ongoing challenge, as we have more devices, varieties of service and this need for this cross-domain interaction capability. It’s almost as if we're stymied. So why is this problem so intractable? Why are we still dealing with passwords and outdated authentication?

Durand: Believe it or not, you have to go back 30 years to when the problem originated, when the Internet was actually born. Vint Cerf, one of the founders and creators of the Internet, was interviewed by a reporter two or three years back. He was asked if he could go back 30 years, when he was creating the Internet, what would he do differently? And he thought about it for a minute and said, "I would have tackled the identity problem."

Durand

He continued, "We never expected the Internet to become the Internet. We were simply trying to route packets between two trusted computers through a standardized networking protocol. We knew that the second we started networking computers, you needed to know who the user was that was making the request, but we also knew that it was a complicated problem." So, in essence, they punted.

Roll forward 30 years, and the bulk of the security industry and the challenges we now face in identity management at scale, Internet or cloud scale, all result from not having tackled identity 30 years ago. Every application, every device, every network that touches the Internet has to ask you who you are. The easiest way to do that is via user name and password, because there was no concept of who the user was on the network at a more fundamental universal layer.

So all this password proliferation comes as a result of the fact that identity is not infrastructure today in the Internet, and it's a hard problem to retrofit the Internet for a more universal notion of who you are, after 30 years of proliferating these identity silos. 

Internet of things

Gardner: It certainly seems like it’s time, because we're not only dealing with people and devices. We're now going into the Internet of Things, including sensors. We have multiple networks and more and more application programming interfaces (APIs) and software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications and services coming online. It seems like we have to move pretty quickly. [See more on identity standards and APIs.]

Durand: We do. The shift that began to exacerbate, or at least highlight, the underlying problem of identity started with cloud and SaaS adoption, somewhere around 2007-2008 time frame. With that, it moved some of the applications outside of the data center. Then, starting around 2010 or 2011, when we started to really get into the smartphone era, the user followed the smartphone off the corporate network and the corporate-issued computer and onto AT and T’s network.

So you have the application outside of the data center. You have the user off the network. The entire notion of how to protect users and data broke. It used to be that you put your user on your network with a company-issued computer accessing software in the data center. It was all behind the firewall.

Those two shifts changed where the assets were, the applications, data, and the user. The paradigm of security and how to manage the user and what they have access to also had to shift and it just brought to light the larger problem in identity.

What we need is the ability for your identity to follow your browser session, as you're moving between all these security domains.

Gardner: And the stakes here are fairly high. We're looking at a tremendously inefficient healthcare system here in the United States, for example. One of the ways that could be ameliorated and productivity could be increased is for more interactions across boundaries, more standards applied to how very sensitive data can be shared. If we can solve this problem, it seems to me there is really a flood of improvement in productivity to come behind it.

Durand: It's enormous and fundamental. Someone shared with me several years ago a simple concept that captures the essence of how much friction we have in the system today in and around identity and users in their browsers going places. The comment was simply this: In your browser you're no longer limited to one domain. You're moving between different applications, different websites, different companies, and different partners with every single click.

What we need is the ability for your identity to follow your browser session, as you're moving between all these security domains, and not have to re-authenticate yourself every single time you click and are off to a new part of the Internet.

We need that whether that means employees sitting at their desktop on a corporate network, opening their browser and going to Salesforce.com, Office 365, Gmail, or Box, or whether it means a partner going into another partner’s application, say to manage inventory as part of their supply chain.

We have to have an ability for the identity to follow the user, and fundamentally that represents this next-gen notion of identity.

Gardner: I want to go back to that next-gen identity definition in a moment, but I notice you didn't mention authenticate through biometrics to a phone or to a PC. You're talking, I think, at a higher abstraction, aren’t you? At software or even the services level for this identity. Or did I read it wrong?

Stronger authentication

Durand: No, you read it absolutely correctly. I was definitely speaking at 100,000 feet there. Part of the solution that I play out is what's coming in the future will be stronger authentication to fewer places, say stronger authentication to your corporate network or to your corporate identity. Then, it's a seamless ability to access all the corporate resources, no matter if they're business applications that are proprietary in the data center or whether or not the applications are in the cloud or even in the private cloud.

So, stronger user authentication is likely through the mobile phone, since the phones have become such a phenomenal platform for authentication. Then, once you authenticate to that phone, there will be a seamless ability to access everything, irrespective of where it resides.

Gardner: Then, when you elevate to that degree, it allows for more policy-driven and intelligence-driven automated and standardized approaches that more and more participants and processes can then adopt and implement. Is that correct?

Durand: That’s exactly correct. We had a notion of who was accessing what, the policy, governance, and the audit trail inside of the enterprise, and that was through the '80s, '90s, and the early 2000s. There was a lot of identity management infrastructure that was built to do exactly that within the enterprise.

We now live in this much more federated scenario, and there is a new generation of identity management that we have to install.

Gardner: With directories.

Durand: Right, directories and all the identity management, Web access management, identity-management provisioning software, and all the governance software that came after that. I refer to all of those systems as Identity and Access Management 1.0.

It was all designed to manage this, as long as all the applications, user, and data were behind the firewall on the company network. Then, the data and the users moved, and now even the business applications are moving outside the data center to the public and private cloud.

We now live in this much more federated scenario, and there is a new generation of identity management that we have to install to enable the security, auditability, and governance of that new highly distributed or federated scenario.

Gardner: Andre, let’s go back to that "next-generation level" of identity management. What did you mean by that? 

Durand:  There are few tenets that fall into the next-generation category. For me, businesses are no longer a silo. Businesses are today fundamentally federated. They're integrating with their supply chain. They're engaging with social identities, hitting their consumer and customer portals. They're integrating with their clients and allowing their clients to gain easier access to their systems. Their employees are going out to the cloud.

Fundamentally integrated

All of these are scenarios where the IT infrastructure in the business itself is fundamentally integrated with its customers, partners, and clients. So that would be the first tenet. They're no longer a silo.

The second thing is that in order to achieve the scale of security around identity management in this new world, we can no longer install proprietary identity and access management software. Every interface for how security and identity is managed in this federated world needs to be standardized.

So we need open identity standards such as SAML, OAuth, and OpenID Connect, in order to scale these use cases between companies. It’s not dissimilar to an era of email, before we had Internet e-mail and the SMTP standard.

Companies had email, but it was enterprise email. It wouldn’t communicate with other companies' proprietary email. Then, we standardized email through SMTP and instantly we had Internet-scaled email.

I predict that the same thing is occurring, and will occur, with identity. We'll standardize all of these cases to open identity standards and that will allow us to scale the identity use cases into this federated world.

So whatever infrastructure we develop needs to normalize the API and mobile access the same way that it does the web access.

The third tenet is that, for many years, we really focused on the browser and web infrastructure. But now, you have users on mobile devices and applications accessing APIs. You have as many, if not most, transactions occurring through the API mobile channel than you do through the web.

So whatever infrastructure we develop needs to normalize the API and mobile access the same way that it does the web access. You don’t want two infrastructures for those two different channels of communication. Those are some of the big tenets of this new world that define an architecture for next-gen identity that’s very different from everything that came before it.

Gardner: To your last tenet, how do we start to combine without gaps and without security issues the ability to exercise a federated authentication and identity management capability for the web activities, as well as for those specific APIs and specific mobile apps and platforms?

Durand: I’ll give you a Ping product specific example, but it’s for exactly that reason that we kind of chose the path that we did for this new product. We have a product called PingAccess, which is a next-gen access control product that provides both web access management for the web browsers and users using web application. It provides API access management when companies want to expose their APIs to developers for mobile applications and to other web services.

Prior to PingAccess in a single product, allowing you to enable policy for both the API channel and the web channel, those two realms typically were served by independent products. You'd buy one product to protect your APIs and you’d buy another product to do your web-access management.

Same product

Now with this next-gen product, PingAccess, you can do both with the same product. It’s based upon OAuth, an emerging standard for identity security for web services, and it’s based upon OpenID Connect, which is a new standard for single sign-on and authentication and authorization in the web tier. [See more on identity standards and APIs.]

We built the product to cross the chasm, between API and web, and also built it based upon open standards, so we could really scale the use cases.

Gardner: Whenever you bring out the words "new" and "standard," you'll get folks who might say, "Well, I'm going to stick with the tried and true." Is there any sense of the level of security, privacy control management, and governance control with these new approaches, as you describe them, that would rebut that instinct to stick with what you have?

Durand: As far as the instinct to stick with what you have, keep in mind that the alternative is proprietary, and there is nothing about proprietary that necessarily means you have better control or more privacy.

There's a tremendous amount of the work that goes into it by the entire industry to make sure that those standards are secure and privacy enabling.

The standards are really defining secure mechanisms to pursue a use case between two different entities. You want a common interface, a common language to communicate. There's a tremendous amount of the work that goes into it by the entire industry to make sure that those standards are secure and privacy enabling.

I'd argue that it's more secure and privacy enabling than the one-off proprietary systems and/or the homegrown systems that many companies developed in the absence of these open standards.

Gardner: Of course, with standards, it's often a larger community, where people can have feedback and inputs to have those standards evolve. That can be a very powerful force when it comes to making sure that things remain stable and safe. Any thoughts about the community approach to this and where these standards are being managed?

Durand: A number of the standards are being managed now by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), and as you know, they're well-regarded, well-known, and certainly well-recognized for their community involvement and having a cycle of improvement that deals with threats, as they emerge, as the community sees them, as a mechanism to improve the standards over time to close those security issues.

Gardner: Going back to the Cloud Identity Summit 2014, is this a coming-out party of sorts for this vision of yours? How do you view the timing right now? Are we at a tipping point, and how important is it to get the word out properly and effectively?

Durand: This is our fifth annual Cloud Identity Summit. We've been working toward this combination of where identity and the cloud and mobile ultimately intersect. All of the trends that I described earlier today -- cloud adoption, mobile adoption, moving the application and the user and the device off the network -- is driving more and more awareness towards a new approach to identity management that is disruptive and fundamentally different than the traditional way of managing identity.

On the cusp

We're right on the cusp where the adoption across both cloud and mobile is irrefutable. Many companies now are moving all in in their strategies to make adoption by their enterprises across those two dimensions a cloud-first and mobile-first posture.

So it is at a tipping point. It's the last nail in the coffin for enterprises to get them to realize that they're now in a new landscape and need to reassess their strategies for identity, when the business applications, the ones that did not convert to SaaS, move to Amazon Web Services, Equinix, or to Rackspace and the private-cloud providers.

That, all of a sudden, would be the last shift where applications have left the data center and all of the old paradigms for managing identity will now need to be re-evaluated from the ground up. That’s just about to happen.

Gardner: Another part of this, of course, is the user themselves. If we can bring to the table doing away with passwords, that itself might encourage a lot of organic adoption and calls for this sort of a capability. Any sense of what we can do in terms of behavior at the user level and what would incentivize them to knock on the door of their developers or IT organization and ask for this sort of capability and vision that we described.

When you experience an ability to get to the cloud, authenticating to the corporation first, and simply swipe with your mobile phone, it just changes how we think about authentication and how we think about the utility of having a smartphone with us all the time.

Durand: Now you're highlighting my kick-off speech at PingCon, which is Ping’s Customer and Partner Conference the day after the Cloud Identity Summit. We acquired a company and a technology last year in mobile authentication to make your mobile phone the second factor, strong authentication for corporations, effectively replacing the one-time tokens that have been issued by traditional vendors for strong authentication.

It’s an application you load on your smartphone and it enables you an ability to simply swipe across the screen to authenticate when requested. We'll be demonstrating the mobile phone as a second-factor authentication. What I mean there is that you would type in your username and password and then be asked to swipe the phone, just to verify your identity before getting into the company.

We'll also demonstrate how you can use the phone as a single-factor authentication. As an example, let’s say I want to go to some cloud service, Dropbox, Box, or Salesforce. Before that, I'm asked to authenticate to the company. I'd get a notification on my phone that simply says, "Swipe." I do the swipe, it already knows who I am, and it just takes me directly to the cloud. That user experience is phenomenal.

When you experience an ability to get to the cloud, authenticating to the corporation first, and simply swipe with your mobile phone, it just changes how we think about authentication and how we think about the utility of having a smartphone with us all the time.

Gardner: This aligns really well, and the timing is awesome for what both Google with Android and Apple with iOS are doing in terms of being able to move from screen to screen seamlessly. Is that something that’s built in this as well?

If I authenticate through my mobile phone, but then I end up working through a PC, a laptop, or any other number of interfaces, is this is something that carries through, so that I'm authenticated throughout my activity?

Entire vision

Durand: That's the entire vision of identity federation. Authenticate once, strongly to the network, and have an ability to go everywhere you want -- data center, private cloud, public SaaS applications, native mobile applications -- and never have to re-authenticate.

Gardner: Sounds good to me, Andre. I'm all for it.  Before we sign off, do we have an example? It's been an interesting vision and we've talked about the what and how, but is there a way to illustrate to show that when this works well perhaps in an enterprise, perhaps across boundaries, what do you get and how does it work in practice?

Durand: There are three primary use cases in our business for next-generation identity, and we break them up into workforce, partner, and customer identity use cases. I'll give you quick examples of all three.

In the workforce use case, what we see most is a desire for enterprises to enable single sign-on to the corporation, to the corporate network, or the corporate active directory, and then single-click access to all the applications, whether they're in the cloud or in the data center. It presents employees in the workforce with a nice menu of all their application options. They authenticate once to see that menu and then, when they click, they can go anywhere without having to re-authenticate.

That's the entire vision of identity federation. Authenticate once, strongly to the network.

That's primarily the workforce use case. It's an ability for IT to control what applications, where they're going in the cloud, what they can do in the cloud to have an audit trail of that, or have full control over the use of the employee accessing cloud applications. The next-gen solutions that we provide accommodate that use case.

The second use case is what we call a customer portal or a customer experience use case. This is a scenario where customers are hitting a customer portal. Many of the major banks in the US and even around the world use Ping to secure their customer website. When you log into your bank to do online banking, you're logging into the bank, but then, when you click on any number of the links, whether to order checks, to get check fulfillment, that goes out to Harland Clarke or to Wealth Management.

That goes to a separate application. That banking application is actually a collection of many applications, some run by partners, some by run by different divisions of the bank. The seamless customer experience, where the user never sees another login or registration screen, is all secured through Ping infrastructure. That’s the second use case.

The third use case is what we call a traditional supply chain or partner use case. The world's largest retailer is our customer. They have some 100,000 suppliers that access inventory applications to manage inventory at all the warehouses and distribution centers.

Prior to having Ping technology, they would have to maintain the username and password of the employees of all those 100,000 suppliers. With our technology they allow single sign-on to that application, so they no longer have to manage who is an employee of all of those suppliers. They've off-loaded the identity management back to the partner by enabling single sign-on.

About 50 of the Fortune 100 are all Ping customers. They include Best Buy, where you don’t have to login to go to the reward zone. You're actually going through Ping.

If you're a Comcast customer and you log into comcast.net and click on any one of the content links or email, that customer experience is secured though Ping. If you log into Marriott, you're going through Ping. The list goes on and on.

In the future

Gardner: Before we sign-off, any idea of where we would be in a year from now? Is this a stake in the ground for the future or something that we could extend our vision toward in terms of what might come next, if we make some strides and a lot of what we have been talking about today gets into a significant uptake and use.

Durand: We're right on the cusp of the smartphone becoming a platform for strong, multi-factor authentication. That adoption is going to be fairly quick. I expect that, and you're going to see enterprises adopting en masse stronger authentication using the smartphone.

Gardner: I suppose that is an accelerant to the bring-your-own-device (BYOD) trend. Is that how you see it as well?

We're right on the cusp of the smartphone becoming a platform for strong, multi-factor authentication.

Durand: It’s a little bit orthogonal to BYOD. The fact that corporations have to deal with that phenomenon brings its own IT headaches, but also its own opportunities in terms of the reality of where people want to get work done.

But the fact that we can assume that all of the devices out there now are essentially smartphone platforms, very powerful computers with lots of capabilities, is going to allow the enterprises now to leverage that device for really strong multi-factor authentication to know who the user is that’s making that request, irrespective of where they are -- if they're on the network, off the network, on a company-issued computer or on their BYOD.

Gardner: We are going to leave it there. You've been listening to a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast discussion on a stubborn speed bump for the digital economy, namely the outdated use of passwords and limited-identity management technology that has resisted fixing for so long.

We've also seen how a new generation of standards and technologies has emerged along with the new vision for how to move beyond precarious dependence on passwords and a more abundant identity schematic towards how we really live and work.

This all comes to a head, as we're approaching the July Cloud Identity Summit 2014 in Monterey, California, which should provide an excellent forum for keeping the transition from passwords to a federated, network-based intelligent capability on track.

With that, a big thank you to our guest, Andre Durand, CEO at Ping Identity. Thank you, sir.

Durand: Thank you, Dana.

Gardner: This is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. A big thank you to our audience as well for joining us, and don’t forget to come back for the next BriefingsDirect podcast.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Ping Identity.

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how enterprises need new standards to deal with a lagging effort on identity and access management as the world moves to the cloud and mobile devices. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2014. All rights reserved.

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• Effective Enterprise Security Begins and Ends with Architectural Best Practices Approach
• BYOD Brings New Challenges for IT: Allowing Greater Access while Protecting Networks
• Identify and Access Management as a Service Gets Boost with SailPoint's IdentityNow Cloud Service
• Identity Governance Becomes Must-Do Items on Personnel Management and Security Checklist

Standards and APIs: How to Build Platforms and Tools to Best Manage Identity and Security

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how strides are being made to develop identity standards and smooth the way for developers to use them quickly and easily


Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Ping Identity.

Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you're listening to BriefingsDirect. Today, we present a sponsored podcast discussion on the pressing need for improved identity management and federation technologies, as well as workable standards and best practices for the application programming interface (API) economy.

Gardner

We'll now examine how business and end-user trends are forcing organizations to both seek openness and improve security for accessing applications, APIs, data, and services anytime, anywhere, and from any device.

Developers are scrambling to find the platforms and tools to help them manage identity and security. Meanwhile, the mobile tier is becoming an integration point for scads of cloud services and APIs, yet unauthorized access to data remains common. Mobile applications are not yet fully secure, and identity control that meets audit requirements is hard to come by.

So while the game has changed for creating new and attractive mobile processes, the same old requirements remain wanting around security, management, interoperability, and openness.

We'll now hear from a panel of experts on how to better chart the waters of identity management and federation, while preserving the need for enterprise-caliber risk remediation and security.

With that, please join me now in welcoming our guests, Bradford Stephens, the Developer and Platforms Evangelist in the CTO’s Office at Ping Identity. Welcome, Bradford.

Bradford Stephens: Hello. Thanks for having me.

Gardner: We're also here with Ross Garrett, Senior Director of Product Marketing at Axway. Good to have you with us, Ross.

Ross Garrett: Good to be here.

Gardner: And we're also here with Kelly Grizzle, Principal Software Engineer at SailPoint Technologies. Welcome, Kelly.

Kelly Grizzle: Thanks, Dana. Happy to talk to you.

Gardner: We are approaching the Cloud Identity Summit 2014 (CIS), which is coming up on July 19 in Monterey, Calif. There's a lot of frustration with identity services that meet the needs of developers and enterprise operators as well. So let’s talk a little bit about what’s going on with APIs.

First to you, Bradford. From a high level, what are the trends in the market that keep this problem pressing? Why is it so difficult to solve?

Interaction changes

Stephens: Well, as soon as we've settled on a standard, the way we interact with computers changes. It wasn’t that long ago that if you had Active Directory and SAML and you hand-wrote security endpoints of model security products, you were pretty much covered.

Stephens

But in the last three or four years, we've gone to a world where mobile is more important than web. Distributed systems are more important than big iron. And we communicate with APIs instead of channels and SDKs, and that requires a whole new way of thinking about the problem.

Gardner: Anything to offer on that, Ross? How do you see the challenge?

Garrett: Ultimately, APIs are becoming the communication framework, the fabric, in which all of the products that we touch today talk to each other. That, by extension, provides a new identity challenge. That’s a lot of reason why we've seen some friction and schizophrenia around the types of identity technologies that are available to us.

So we see waves of different technologies come and go, depending on what is the flavor of the month. That has caused some frustration for developers, and will definitely come up during our Cloud Identity Summit in a couple of weeks.

Gardner: Kelly, how has the role of APIs, as we have now been describing them, changed the identity world? Do you see this as an API and identity collision? 

Grizzle: APIs are becoming exponentially more important in the identity world now. As Bradford alluded to, the landscape is changing. There are mobile devices as well as software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers out there who are popping up new services all the time. The common thread between all of them is the need to be able to manage identities. They need to be able to manage the security within their system. It makes total sense to have a common way to do this.

Grizzle

APIs are key for all the different devices and ways that we connect to these service providers. Becoming standards based is extremely important, just to be able to keep up with the adoption of all these new service providers coming on board.

Gardner: As we describe this as the API economy, I suppose it’s just as much a marketplace and therefore, as we have seen in other markets, people strive for predominance. There's jockeying going on. Bradford, is this a matter of an architectural shift? Is this a matter of standards? Or is this a matter of de-facto standards? Or perhaps all of the above?

Stephens: It’s getting complex quickly. I think we're settling on standards, like it or not, mostly positively. I see most people settling on at least OAuth 2.0 as a standard token, and OpenID Connect for implementation and authentication of information, but I think that’s about as far as we get.

There's a lot of struggle with established vendors vying to implement these protocols. They try to bridge the gap between the old world of say SAML and Active Directory and all that, and the new world of SCIM, OAuth, OpenID Connect. The standards are pretty settled, at least for the next two years, but the tools, how we implement them, and how much work it takes developers to implement them, are going to change a lot, and hopefully for the better.

Evolving standards

Gardner: Ross, do you agree that we've settled on the handful of standards that we need, or at least the major ones, and that this is a matter now of implementation? How do you view the evolution?

Garrett: We have identified a number of new standards that are bridging this new world of API-oriented connectivity. Learning from the past of SAML and legacy, single sign-on infrastructure, we definitely need some good technology choices.

Garrett

The standards seem to be leading the way. But by the same token, we should keep a close eye on the market changing with regards to how fast standards are changing. We've all seen things like OAuth progress slower than some of the implementations out there. This means the ratification of the standard was happening after many providers had actually implemented it. It's the same for OpenID Connect.

We are in line there, but the actual standardization process doesn’t always keep up with where the market wants to be.

Gardner: We've seen this play out before that the standards can lag. Getting consensus, developing the documentation and details, and getting committees to sign off can take time, and markets move at their own velocity. Many times in the past, organizations have hedged their bets by adopting multiple standards or tracking multiple ways of doing things, which requires federation and integration.

Kelly, are there big tradeoffs with standards and APIs? How do we mitigate the risk and protect ourselves by both adhering to standards, but also being agile in the market?

Grizzle: That’s kind of tricky. You're right in that standards tend to lag. That’s just part and parcel of the standardization process. It’s like trying to pass a bill through Congress. It can go slow.

You're right in that standards tend to lag. That’s just part and parcel of the standardization process.

Something that we've seen some of these standards do right, from OAuth and from the SCIM perspective, is that both of those have started their early work with a very loose standardization process, going through not one of the big standards bodies, but something that can be a little bit more nimble. That’s how the SCIM 1.0 and 1.1 specs came out, and they came out in a reasonable time frame to get people moving on it.

Now that things have moved to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), development has slowed down a little bit, but people have something to work with and are able to keep up with the changes going on there.

I don’t know that people necessarily need to adopt multiple standards to hedge their bets, but by taking what’s already there and keeping a pulse on the things that are going to change, as well as the standard being forward-thinking enough to allow some extensibility within it, service providers and clients, in the long run, are going to be in a pretty good spot.

Quick primer

Gardner: We've talked a few technical terms so far, and just for the benefit of our audience, I'd like to do a quick primer, perhaps with you Bradford. To start: OAuth, this is with the IETF now. Could you just quickly tell the audience what OAuth is, what it’s doing, and why it’s important when we talk about API, security and mobile?

Stephens: OAuth is the foundation protocol for authorization when it comes to APIs for web applications. OAuth 2 is much more flexible than OAuth 1.

Basically, it allows applications to ask for access to stuff. It seems very vague, but it’s really powerful once you start getting the right tokens for your workflows. And it provides the same foundation for everything else we do for identity and APIs.

The best example I can think of is when you log into Facebook, and Facebook asks whether you really want this app to see your birthday, all your friends’ information, and everything else. Being able to communicate all that over the OAuth 2.0 is a lot easier than how it was with OAuth 1.0 a few years ago.

Gardner: How about OpenID Connect. This is with the OpenID Foundation. How does that relate, and what is it?

If OAuth actually is the medium, OpenID Connect can be described as the content of the message. It’s not the message itself.

Stephens: If OAuth actually is the medium, OpenID Connect can be described as the content of the message. It’s not the message itself. That’s usually done with the Token, Javascript object notation (JSON) Web Token, but OpenID Connect provides the actual identity information.

When you access an API and you authenticate, you choose a scope, and one of the most common scopes is OpenID Profile. This OpenID Profile will just have things like your username, maybe your address, various other pieces of identity information, and it describes who the "you" is, who you are.

Gardner: And SCIM, you mentioned that Kelly, and I know you have been involved with it. So why don’t you take the primer for SCIM, and I believe it’s Simple Cloud Identity Management?

Grizzle: That's the historical name for it, Simple Cloud Identity Management. When we took the standard to the IETF, we realized that the problems that we were solving were a little bit broader than just the cloud and within the cloud. So the acronym now stands for the System for Cross-domain Identity Management.

That’s kind of a mouthful, but the concept is pretty simple. SCIM is really just an API and a schema that allows you to manage identities and identity-related information. And by manage them, I mean to create identities in systems to delete them, update them, change the entitlements and the group memberships, and things like that.

Gardner: From your perspective, Kelly, what is the relationship then between OAuth and SCIM?

Managing identities

Grizzle: OAuth, as Bradford mentioned, is primarily geared toward authorization, and answers the question, "Can Bob access this top-secret document?" SCIM is really not in the authorization and authentication business at all. SCIM is about managing identities.

OAuth assumes that an identity is already present. SCIM is able to create that identity. You can create the user "Bob." You can say that Bob should not have access to that top-secret document. Then, if you catch Bob doing some illicit activity, you can quickly disable his account through a SCIM call. So they fit together very nicely.

Gardner: In the real world, developers like to be able to use APIs, but they might not be familiar with all the details that we've just gone through on some of these standards and security approaches.

How do we make this palatable to developers? How do we make this something that they can implement without necessarily getting into the nitty-gritty? Are there some approaches to making this a bit easier to consume as a developer?

The best thing we can do is have tool-providers give them tools in their native language or in the way developers work with things.

Stephens: As a developer who's relatively new to this field -- I worked in database for three years -- I've had personal experience of how hard it is to wrap your head around all the standards and all these flows and stuff. The best thing we can do is have tool providers give them tools in their native language, or in the way developers work with things.

This needs well-documented, interactive APIs -- things like Swagger -- and lots of real-world code examples. Once you've actually done the process of authentication through OAuth, getting a JSON Web Token, and getting an OpenID Connect profile, it’s really  simple to see how it all works together, if you do it all through a SaaS platform that handles all the nitty-gritty, like user creation and all that.

If you have to roll your own, though, there's not a lot of information out there besides the WhitePages and Wall Post. It’s just a nightmare. I tried to roll my own. You should never roll your own.

So having SaaS platforms to do all this stuff, instead of having documents, means that developers can focus on providing their applications, and just understand that I have this media and project, not about which tokens carry information that accesses OAuth and OpenID Connect.

I don’t really care how it all works together; I just know that I have this token and it has the information I need. And it’s really liberating, once you finally get there.

So I guess the best thing we can do is provide really great tools that solve the identity-management problems.

Tools: a key point

Garrett: Tools, that’s the key point here. Whether we like it or not, developers tend to be kind of lazy sometimes and they certainly don’t have the time or the energy to understand every facet of the OAuth specification. So providing tools that can wrap that up and make it as easy to implement as possible is really the only way that we get to really secure mobile applications or any API interaction. Because without a deep understanding of how this stuff works, you can make pretty fundamental errors.

Having said that, at least we've started to take steps in the right direction with the standards. OAuth is built at least with the idea of mobile access in mind. It’s leveraging REST and JSON types, rather than SOAP and XML types, which are really way too heavyweight for mobile applications.

So the standards, in their own right, have taken us in the right direction, but we absolutely need tools to make it easy for developers.

Gardner: Do you have anything to offer on that, Kelly, in terms of maybe a service-provider role? As an identity service provider yourself, is there something that intermediary can bring to help developers and automate some of these issues?

Grizzle: I think so. Bradford and Ross hit on a lot of it. Tools are of the utmost importance, and some of the identity providers and people with skin in the game, so to speak, are helping to create these tools and to open-source them, so that they can be used by other people.

Identity isn’t the most glamorous thing to talk about, except when it all goes wrong, and some huge leak makes the news headlines.

Another thing that Ross touched on was keeping the simplicity in the spec. These things that we're addressing -- authorization, authentication, and managing identities -- are not extremely simple concepts always. So in the standards that are being created, finding the right balance of complexity versus completeness and flexibility is a tough line to walk.

With SCIM, as you said, the first initial of the acronym used to stand for Simple. It’s still a guiding principle that we use to try to keep these interactions as simple as possible. SCIM uses REST and JSON, just like some of these other standards. Developers are familiar with that. Putting the burden on the right parties for implementation is very important, too. To make it easy on clients, the ones who are going to be implementing these a lot, is pretty important.

Gardner: Do these standards do more than help the API economy settle out and mature? Cloud providers or SaaS providers want to provide APIs and they want the mobile apps to consume them. By the same token, the enterprises want to share data and want data to get out to those mobile tiers. So is there a data-management or brokering benefit that goes along with this? Are we killing multiple birds with one set of standards?

Garrett: The real issue here, when we think about the new types of products and services that the API economy is helping us deliver, is around privacy and ultimately customer confidence. Putting the user in control of who gets to access which parts of my identity profile, or how contextual information about me can perhaps make identity decisions easier, allows us to lock down, or better understand, these privacy concerns that the world has.

Identity isn’t the most glamorous thing to talk about -- except when it all goes wrong -- and some huge leak makes the news headlines, or some other security breach has lost credit-card numbers or people’s usernames and passwords.

Hand in hand

In terms of how identity services are developing the API economy, the two things go hand in hand. Unless people are absolutely certain about how their information is being used, they simply choose not to use these services. That’s where all the work that the API management vendors and the identity management vendors are doing and bringing that together is so important.

Gardner: You mentioned that identity might not be sexy or top of mind, but how else can you manage all these variables on an automated or policy-driven basis? When we move to the mobile tier, we're dealing with multiple networks. We're dealing with multiple services ... cloud, SaaS, and APIs. And then we're linking this back to enterprise applications. How other than identity can this possibly be managed?

Stephens: Identity is often thought of as usernames and passwords, but it’s evolving really quickly to be so much more. This is something I harp on a lot, but it’s really quickly becoming that who we are online is more important than who we are in real life. How I identify myself online is more important than the driver's license I carry in my wallet.

And it’s important that developers understand that because any connected application is going to have to have a deep sense of identity.

As you know, your driver’s license is like a real-life token of information that describes what you're allowed to do in your life. That’s part of your identity. Anybody who has lost their license knows that, without that, there's not a whole lot you can do.

Bringing that analogy back to the Internet, what you're able to access and what access you're able to give other people or other applications to change important things, like your Facebook posts, your tweets, or go through your email and help categorize that is important. All these little tasks that help define how you live, are all part of your identity. And it’s important that developers understand that because any connected application is going to have to have a deep sense of identity.

Gardner: Let me pose the same question, but in a different way. When you do this well, when you can manage identity, when you can take advantage of these new standards that extend into mobile requirements and architectures, with the API economy in mind, what do you get? What does it endow you with? What can you do that perhaps you couldn’t do if you were stuck in some older architectures or thinking?

Grizzle: Identity is key to everything we do. Like Bradford was just saying, the things that you do online are built on the trust that you have with who is doing them. There are very few services out there where you want completely anonymous access. Almost every service that you use is tied to an identity.

So it’s of paramount importance to get a common language between these. If we don’t move to standards here, it's just going to be a major cost problem, because there are a ton of different providers and clients out there.

If every provider tries to roll their own identity infrastructure, without relying on standards, then, as a client, if I need to talk to two different identity providers, I need to write to two different APIs. It’s just an explosive problem, with the amount that everything is connected these days.

So it’s key. I can’t see how the system will stand up and move forward efficiently without these common pieces in place.

Use cases

Gardner: Do we have any examples along these same lines of what do you get when you do this well and appropriately based on what you all think is the right approach and direction? We've been talking at a fairly abstract level, but it really helps solidify people’s thinking and understanding when they can look at a use-case, a named situation or an application.

Stephens: If you want a good example of how OAuth delegation works, building a Facebook app or just working on Facebook app documentation is pretty straightforward. It gives you a good idea of what it means to delegate certain authorization.

Likewise, Google is very good. It’s very integrated with OAuth and OpenID Connect when it comes to building things on Google App Engine.

The thing that these new identity service providers have been offering has, behind the scenes, been making your lives more secure.

So if you want to secure an API that you built using Google Cloud on Google App Engine, which is trivial to do, Google Cloud Endpoints provides a really good example. In fact, there is a button that you can hit in their example button called Use OAuth and that OAuth transports OpenID Connect profile, and that’s a pretty easy way to go about it.

Garrett: I'll just take a simple consumer example, and we've touched on this already. It was the idea in the past, where every individual service or product is offering only their identity solution. So I have to create a new identity profile for every product or service that I'm using. This has been the case for a long time in the consumer web and in the enterprise setting as well.

So we have to be able to solve that problem and offer a way to reuse existing identities. It involves so taking technologies like OpenID Connect, which is totally hidden to the end user really, but simply saying that you can use this existing identity, your LinkedIn or  Facebook credentials, etc., to access some new products, takes a lot of burden away from the consumer. Ultimately, that provides us a better security model end to end.

The thing that these new identity service providers have been offering has, behind the scenes, been making your lives more secure. Even though some people might shy away from using their Facebook identity across multiple applications, in many ways it’s actually better to, because that’s really one centralized place where I can actually see, audit, and adjust the way that I'm presenting my identity to other people.

That’s a really great example of how these new technologies are changing the way we interact with products everyday.

Standardized approach

Grizzle: At SailPoint, the company that I work for, we have a client, a large chip maker, who has seen the identity problem and really been bitten by it within their enterprise. They have somewhere around 3,500 systems that have to be able to talk to each other, exchange identity data, and things like that.

The issue is that every time they acquire a new company or bring a new group into the fold, that company has its own set of systems that speak their own language, and it takes forever to get them integrated into their IT organization there.

So they've said that they're not going to support every app that these people bring into the IT infrastructure. They're going with SCIM and they are saying that all these apps that come in, if they speak SCIM, then they'll take ownership of those and pull them into their environment. It should just plug in nice and easy. They're doing it just because of a resourcing perspective. They can't keep up with the amount of change to their IT infrastructure and keep everything automated.

They can't keep up with the amount of change to their IT infrastructure and keep everything automated.

Gardner: I want to quickly look at the Cloud Identity Summit that’s coming up. It sounds like a lot of these issues are going to be top of mind there. We're going to hear a lot of back and forth and progress made.

Does this strike you, Bradford, as a tipping point of some sort, that this event will really start to solidify thinking and get people motivated? How do you view the impact of this summit on cloud identity?

Stephens: At CIS, we're going to see a lot of talk about real-world implementation of these standards. In fact, I'm running the Enterprise API track and I'll be giving a talk on end-to-end authentication using JAuth, OAuth, and OpenID Connect. This year is the year that we show that it's possible. Next year, we'll be hearing a lot more about people using it in production.

Gardner: You've been listening to a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast discussion on the pressing need for improved identity management and federation technologies, as well as workable standards and best practices for the API economy.

While we've seen how unauthorized access to data remains a problem, and mobile application aren't always secure, we're beginning to see a lot of progress made in ways that standards can be used to extend safety while increasing the ability for developers to get their jobs done.

So a big thanks to our guests, Bradford Stephens, Developer and Platforms Evangelist in the CTO’s Office at Ping Identity. Thanks so much, Bradford.

Stephens: Thank you, everybody else. You made this one really interesting.

Gardner: Also, we have been pleased to have Ross Garrett with us, the Senior Director of Product Marketing at Axway. Thank you, sir.

Garrett: Thank you very much.

Gardner: And lastly, Kelly Grizzle, the Principal Software Engineer at SailPoint Technologies. Thanks so much for your input.

Grizzle: Thanks for inviting me, Dana.

Gardner: This is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. A big thanks to our audience for joining us as well. You can find more information on these subjects at the IETF, at Ping Identity, Axway, SailPoint Technologies, and of course there will be a lot of information generated at the Cloud Identity Summit on July 19.

So once again to our audience thanks for listening, and don’t forget to come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Ping Identity.

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how strides are being made to develop identity standards and smooth the way for developers to use them quickly and easily. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2014. All rights reserved.

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