[Microid] MicroID hashing algorithm(s) and normalization

Evan Prodromou evan at prodromou.name
Thu Dec 7 11:58:35 EST 2006


On Wed, 2006-06-12 at 10:33 -0700, Peter Saint-Andre wrote:

> But how do we know programmatically when we create the microid that a
> given URL is an OpenID?

You mean, how do we know that the first string that we're putting into
the hash is an OpenID? Probably because the user said, "here is my
OpenID", and maybe they validated it using the OpenID protocol. Or maybe
we got it out of our database from the user_openid table.

The big question is: why would we care what it is? As far as the microid
format is concerned, it's just a string.

For the publisher of the resource, they can add a microid <meta> tag for
each ID they have for the user (email, OpenID, whatever).

For someone like claimID trying to validate, they can try each of the
identifiers they have for a person (every email address, every OpenID,
every i-name) and see if there's a match. Since microid is so cheap to
generate, it's not hard at all.

~Evan


________________________________________________________________________
Evan Prodromou <evan at prodromou.name>
http://evan.prodromou.name/


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