Justice League Blog
There are only losers in Cloud federated IAM
I read a question on one of the cloud mailing lists asking which of the federated authentication protocols (SAML, OpenID, Oauth, WRAP, etc) would win. My initial reaction was to reply, “Isn’t the question which ones won’t lose?” Okay, that’s snarky and perhaps a double negative, but I find it a rather dubious notion to think that there will be one winner. Aren’t authentication protocols like camera lens mounts? There are several types and all that’s important is that you can share lenses with the people you hang with? Why does there have to be a winner?
If you’re consuming a SaaS, it would seem like the service will support N protocols and you can either support one of those N. It seems like the big SaaS vendors will have some set of standards in place and it will take a couple of big customers to get them to expand that set. What’s it going to take for Force.com to implement something other than SAML?
For PaaS and SaaS, your organization is in control of the application, so you can handle authentication by whatever scheme you choose. If you’re working with some business partners, then you implement whatever protocol you both can agree to.
The protocols/mechanisms so far is only for user authentication. What would be helpful is if there were some way to enable authentication to include the cloud service itself. Cloud services all require some form of account information to do anything. If it’s a service like Amazon, there are also the private keys that have to be maintained, managed and passed to just gain access to the infrastructure. What all of the different delivery models have in common is the problem of authenticating to the cloud service. Is this a problem for identity management or just a (not so) simple credential management problem?
So, the question is not which one protocol wins, but which ones lose since you can only hurt yourself by implementing something that dies off. Then you can turn your attention to the problem of securing the authentication to the cloud service itself.
