Why OpenID delegation rocks

Posted by yrashk

OpenID has a neat feature — you can use your own website to be your identity. You can simply put something like:


<link rel="openid.server" href="http://www.myopenid.com/server" />
<link rel="openid.delegate" href="http://myname.myopenid.com" />

into HTML head of your http://myname.com/, and voila, myname.com is your uniquely named identity!

But what is more important, it can protect you from your OpenID provider’s down time (just like MyOpenID has a planned down time today). If you will need to sign in with your identity while your provider is down, you can simply update your delegation properties to point to any other OpenID provider where you have an account, and you’re done, you can sign in! Say “No” to down times!

Comments

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  1. Jorge garcia – September 12, 2007 @ 06:47 AM

    Sorry but VOILA is not voila for a computer illiterate.

    Cuold you help with a step by step how to? please.

    Jorge

  2. Yurii Rashkovskii – September 12, 2007 @ 09:05 AM

    Step by step instructions for what? From obtaining OpenID to delegating?

  3. Ashley Moran – September 12, 2007 @ 03:14 PM

    So, if I have an accout on a site that uses OpenID, can I use a delegated account to sign into that site? Or do I need to re-register using the new ID? I was under the impression that the OpenID URL was a tag to identify you, so doesn’t really make sense if multiple URLs can authenticate the same user?

    It’s a moot point right now, seeing as my own domain is not running yet as Pipex have STILL not given me the fixed IP I asked for two weeks ago…

  4. Yurii Rashkovskii – September 12, 2007 @ 09:03 PM

    Ashley, you need to be either re-registered with new ID for delegated identity, or in case when you are an ID early adopter, you can ask us to update your identity URL.

  5. Ashley Moran – September 13, 2007 @ 01:19 AM

    Ok cool – makes sense.

  6. Gary Krall – September 13, 2007 @ 11:09 AM

    Hi Yurii: I am the technical director for the PiP/SeatBelt products here at Verisign. Couple of comments:

    1) For a description on the specifics of delegation see for reference: http://openid.net/wiki/index.php/Delegation

    2) If you haven’t checked it out we have released an updated version of the PiP at: http://pip.verisignlabs.com. We have added 2nd factor authentication via hardware token as well as a very cool Firefox extension called “Seatbelt”.

    Thanks!