[Microid] MicroID on Slashdot
Peter Saint-Andre
stpeter at stpeter.im
Sat Aug 30 00:58:25 EDT 2008
Evan Prodromou wrote:
> Interesting article on MicroID on Slashdot:
>
> http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/08/28/2241238
>
> -Evan
Hi Evan,
Yes the author of that study sent us a copy a while back. We need to add
some information about this to the security considerations of the
MicroID specification.
Via a private email to the author, Jer posted as follows:
******
If someone's email address is the same as or easily guessable from their
social network name/profile, that's an issue regardless of microid being
able to confirm it, so I really don't see or care for the spam-angle on
this (there are much greater perils in this world of ours).
As far as what I would call the PI-angle, the ability to confirm that an
individuals email matches to a given page/profile, that's kind of what
the *point* of MicroID is, so yes any site supporting it should have opt
in/out and suggest that people use private or custom email addresses
(like name+tag at gmail) if they are concerned about privacy.
For historical sake, one of my initial ideas was to have any supporting
site provide a private code/pin only to the user that was also hashed,
and that user can provide that to anyone to independently confirm the
MicroID... but that's a pretty confusing process for your average user
to understand, and anyone paranoid can accomplish the same w/ custom
email addresses anyway.
******
I'd have to agree with Jer on these points -- it's easier to harvest
email addresses in other ways, services need to provide an opt-out (or,
better, opt-in) for MicroID usage, people can overcome many of the
trivial attacks with throw-away or single-purpose email addresses, and
services can use obscured (local) URLs to generate the hashes.
Peter
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