Federated Security with Windows Live ID (PT/EN)

NunoGodinho — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 20:20:57 GMT

Being Windows Live ID one of the existing authentication modes and that has as big advantage the already existing infrastructure provided by Microsoft and with no cost associates, and also making the Single-Sign-On for several solutions that use Windows Live ID as the authentication mechanism, and if we add the fact that there are mode then 420 millions of registered users of Windows Live ID and more then 1 billion of authentications by day we see that this is a well known and with high used form of authentication. Of course we know that this values have to do with the usage of MSN Messenger, but we can capitalize the knowledge and trust from the users in our solutions. But when we look to enterprise solutions there can be situations that need to share authentication to our solutions between Windows Live ID and at the same time the users that exist on our enterprise and that are managed by Active Directory, LDAP or any other (Ex. An Online Store that we want to give customers the possibility of authenticating using Windows Live ID, and the Administrator Users are solutions from our Company, XPTO, that has their users registered on Active Directory.). In this cases what can we do?

The solution for this question is to use Federated Security. For this the Windows Live Platform Team made available a service that provides this and also published this very interesting article on MSDN where you can see how it works and how can we take advantage of it. I strongly suggest this reading.

Federated Security Framework

NunoGodinho — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 21:39:36 GMT

One of the great issues that exist when developing solutions is the Security, and when we talk about SaaS or S+S the issue becomes a lot more complicated and so we have to use Federated Identity, and there are several ways to do this and as Frederik Chong from Microsoft and Dwayne Taylor from RDA wrote on their article Federated Identity: Scenarios, Architecture and Implementation this is not a easy issue to solve and so they show some ways that can be used, and although this is a 2006 article, it's still very interesting to read about the issues, but now the Federated Security Team is developing a framework for Federated Identity with the codename "Zermatt" that's present on the Microsoft Connect Services site, and this already have a public beta that can be downloaded and used.

For more information's about the Zermatt you can check the Microsoft Connect Services site and there are some whitepapers for developes you can read to get to know a little better this new framework, and you can also check this Matias Wolosky Blog entry and the Vittorio's blog from Microsoft that made the announcement of the framework.

This is a framework that will help a lot when developing claims-aware applications. This framework will work on top of technologies like Windows Cardspace, WCF, ASP.NET and several other to help developers and architects.

Nuno Filipe Godinho : Federated Identity

Federated Security with Windows Live ID (PT/EN)

Federated Security Framework