Microsoft Gets Behind OpenID

February 8th, 2007: Open source identity management received a boost from none other than Microsoft today, as Bill Gates declared that it would support OpenID during his keynote address at this week’s RSA Security conference.

OpenID is an open-source, distributed identity management system that uses a single web address in conjunction with a secure user-credentials system to manage a user’s identity on the internet and eliminate the need for usernames and passwords.

"Everywhere you go on the Web there are issues about reputation and trust," said Gates. "Some blog environments want anonymous people to say anything, and in other environments, they want you to represent some credentials about who you are. And that's just not going to scale with the kind of password thing we have today."

Getting rid of separate logins for the legions of sites that now require them will please many, however, according to gates the plan doesn’t end there. Microsoft has promised to integrate OpenID 2.0 with its own CardSpace ID management technology, an addition to Windows Vista.

“We saw some of the people working in the Web 2.0 world and they came up with OpenID 2.0.,” said Gates in his keynote address. “We were working on CardSpace, one growing up from the blog world and one from the enterprise space. And in fact, we are going to support OpenID 2.0 and they are expanding so they are going to have CardSpace as a standard capability, because it solves some attacks, particularly Man-In-The-Middle attacks.”

While many are positive about Microsoft’s involvement with the open source project, some are sceptical due to Microsoft’s past efforts with ID management, not to mention the view that it is traditionally an enemy of open source.

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