Today I read Radovan's comment, and then read his whitepaper Basic Properties of the Persona Model. It was a good read because earlier today I met with others at my employer to discuss our ideas for the model. They suggested a couple changes (such as recursion at certain layers) that bring it closer to Radovan's model. We're going to meet again on Thursday to try to evolve the model some more. Perhaps it will get even closer to Radovan's.
Radovan also raised a concern that "only access to the account can be authenticated, not really the person", and that you cannot be sure that "...the physical person really corresponds to the user of the account." At my employer we're trying to move away from authenticating at the account, and instead authenticate closer to the person with a smart card, or accept a partner's assertion of an authentication event that happened at the user's home company/organization. For the users with smart cards we'll have pretty good assurance of who the actual user is. For the assertions, we won't honor the assertions unless we're satisfied that they provide a particular degree of assurance. I'll be interested to get more feedback from Radovan (or anybody) on our approach to move authentication away from accounts.
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My thinking is that we cannot authenticate a realspace person in cyberspace. The realspace-cyberspace boundary just doesn't make that possible. What we can is to authenticate cyberspace persona and have some degree of confidence that it really represents the realspace person. This degree of confidence may be quite high, especially if multi-factor authentication and proper setup (provisioning) is used. But I argue that it cannot be 100%. Therefore a clean distinction between realspace person and cyberspace persona is necessary in the model.
I think that authentication can be moved away from typical enterprise accounts. But then it needs to be moved to some kind of "primary" persona. And we will believe that this primary persona very likely maps to realspace person.
Marty – This is excellent meat for a discussion that should be valuable to enterprises with an identity crisis (challenge).
The concepts must be scalable and included identities that are not carbon-based live forms. “Things” should also be considered. The DMTF’s current version of the Common Information model (CIM) has matured over the past few years and may be useful in understanding well-vetted relationships. It’s available in Visio (UML), XML, and MOF formats here: http://www.dmtf.org/standards/cim/cim_schema_v219.
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