Back in July, I wrote about a new RESTful API that cloud providers and provisioning vendors are working on for doing identity provisioning and synching: Simple Cloud Identity Management, or SCIM (like the milk). At last week's Internet Identity Workshop -- only five months after this draft spec made its formal debut! -- I had a chance to see the SCIM developers' live interop session in action. The interop saw successful participation by the likes of Cisco, Ping Identity, Sailpoint, salesforce.com, Technology Nexus, and UnboundID, with user accounts being securely created and torn down rapid-fire over the ether.

What's more, in talking with a more traditional on-premises identity vendor later in the week, I discovered that they loved how SCIM was shaping up, and planned to check it out ASAP as a way they could expose their own provisioning functionality.

In this Zero Trust world, with perimeters melting all over the place, I'm seeing signs that this lightweight API trend for IdM functionality is only going to accelerate. What do you think? If you're coming to Forrester Security Forum in a couple of weeks, I hope you'll grab me for a conversation about how this trend impacts your plans.

“There is no enterprise — the work we do is a collection of people that dynamically changes through a mix of organization control.” That’s what I heard from one venerable old construction company while working on my new research report, Protecting Enterprise APIs With A Light Touch. I wanted to investigate how enterprises are using and securing lightweight RESTful web services, and in particular to figure out the problems for which OAuth is well suited. (You might recall my request for feedback in a prior post.)

 What I found was that forward-thinking enterprises of many types – not just hip-happenin’ Web 2.0 companies – are pushing service security and access management to the limit in environments that can truly be called “Zero Trust,” to use John Kindervag’s excellent formulation. This particular firm dynamically manipulates authorizations to control access to a variety of innovative lightweight APIs on which the whole company is being run, not actually distinguishing between “internal” and “external” users. They’ve kind of turned themselves inside-out.

If you're in the habit of checking out only the Security & Risk Professionals blog, you might have missed Jonathan's takeaways over on the Vendor Strategy side: What The New White House Cybersecurity Proposal Means For The IT Security Industry, Businesses, And Consumers. Interestingly, he puts consumers in both the "winners" column and the "losers" column. Read the post to see why, and feel free to share your thoughts with us on these matters!

A decade after launching the SAML standard and seeing its, shall we say, stately pace of adoption, it’s wild to see real single sign-on and federated attribute sharing starting to take off for social networking, retail sites, online gaming, and more — not to mention seeing the US government starting to consume private-sector identities on citizen-facing websites.

Last week, we published a report on Outsourcing Identity Assurance. In it, I examine this “Government 2.0” effort, including the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace (NSTIC), and its innovations around identity assurance, and the confidence you can have in the real-world verification of the identity you’ve been given by an identity provider. We’re predicting you’ll see new Web 2.0-ish ways to outsource identity verification in the coming three years, driven by use cases like e-prescribing, high-value eCommerce, and even online dating.

If you're a security and risk professional in charge of protecting consumer-facing applications, you may have heard that OpenID is a “toy,” or it's an insecure protocol, or other critiques. And then here comes the recent news by former early adopter 37signals to drop its OpenID login support, which has occasioned some soul-searching in the Web 2.0 identity community. Check out commentary from Scott Gilbertson of Wired's WebMonkey, Dare Obasanjo, and reaction from “social login” vendor JanRain

When OpenID appeared on the scene, more robust solutions based on SAML were well under way for many years and seeing adoption, but only in scenarios involving limited circles of trust — typically point-to-point enterprise outsourcing scenarios and specialized higher-education communities — rather than in broad-based consumer populations.