The Power Of Twitter & God's IT Usage

When I posted my musings on "Identity & Access Management In The Cloud" the other day, I did something I don't normally do. I advertised the fact that I had posted something via Twitter.

Now, my blog is mainly a way of recording my own thoughts as I travel through space and time and I treat it like an online diary that I can look back on with fondness. I don't really expect anyone to read the stuff. I certainly don't expect anyone to agree with my thoughts. And the notion that people would even take the time to comment on the ramblings never entered my head. But then there was Twitter!

My "tweet" mentioned the words identity, access, management and cloud and seems to have been picked up by quite a large number of people - comparatively speaking! I had 3x more visitors in one day than I normally do in a month!

If anything, this turn of events impresses upon me the following:

• People are interested in the Cloud
• People are interested in security when it comes to the Cloud
• If people are interested in what I have to say, I need to be very careful what I say!

That last one might seem strange, but I've always been careful with my online persona - I think. I don't use bad language whether it be within my blog entries, on Twitter, on Facebook or wherever. There's no need for it and we should remember that it's permanent! I'm also a little nervy about writing anything that is controversial. (I guess I just wanna be loved and can't bear the thought of upsetting anyone?)  In other words, my reputation is obviously very important to me.

Facebook & Twitter
There has been a lot of online discussions surrounding the management of identity with regards to online services such as Facebook & Twitter. While enterprises won't be too impressed with this notion, it is quite understandable that the likes of Facebook & Twitter could emerge as identity provider kings! I can't afford to have my Facebook account suspended and I certainly don't want my Twitter feed to suffer any kind of service interruption. As such, behaving appropriately when using these services is important to me. And, of course, because I'm a well behaved boy on these services, there's a good chance that they could be used to assert my identity quite faithfully.

Think about it. Would I be keen to authenticate myself to a dubious website using my reputable Facebook credentials? Reputation management, for me, is just as important as identity management (if not more so).

God
DISCLAIMER: If Pope Benedict and Richard Dawkins were lined up in the school playground pulling together their "gangs", I'd line up behind Dawkins. Sorry Benny.

Someone told me today that they doubted whether they would make it to heaven because they reckoned that God's choice of IT components would be akin to how government's go about their purchasing of IT components. It got me thinking...

• Would God choose Oracle, DB2, MS SQL Server or MySQL? Nobody ever got fired by buying IBM, but who could fire God?
• Would God choose Windows, AIX, Solaris or Linux for his servers?
• Would God go Mac?
• Would God deploy IIS or WebSphere?
• Would God embrace open-source?

And what about Dawkins? Presumably he would prefer to select IT services based on the survival of the fittest model?

I'm having a laugh, of course. But the selection of any IT component can't possibly be determined to be right or wrong based on the component itself. It can be determined to be right or wrong based on how it interacts with the user and other IT components but I can't tell you that Macs are better than PCs. I can't tell you that Apache HTTP Server is better than Sun's offering. I can't tell you that PHP is better than Python which is better than COBOL which is better than C#, etc.

And the point? Well, I was asked yesterday whether I could help a customer select a database vendor and the options were Oracle and IBM. My answer? Technically, I come from the "a DBMS is a DBMS". The real questions are:

• Do you have in-house skills in one of the technologies
• Do you have existing relationships with either vendor
• What is the cost to you - TCO-wise

Technically? Maybe I'm past caring. The "religious" questions are so much more important!

NOTE: The answer is DB2. No. Oracle. No. MySQL. Yeah. That's the one. Oh. Maybe not :-)

Identity & Access Management In The Cloud

Last week I was asked to give a presentation at the IBM Tivoli User Group on Identity & Access Management In The Cloud to IBM employees, IBM Business Partners and customers of IBM Tivoli Security products. I soon realised that my first problem was going to be defining The Cloud. Not everyone I spoke to in advance of the presentation knew what The Cloud was!

So What Is The Cloud?
The Cloud seems to be a term bandied about all too readily these days and for many people it merely represents everything that happens on the Internet. Others, however, are a little more strict with their definition:

"For me, cloud computing is a commercial extension of utility computing that enables scalable, elastic, highly available deployment of software applications while minimizing the level of detailed interaction with the underlying technology stack itself."

"Computing on tap - you get what you want literally from a socket in the wall."

"Cloud computing is just a virtual datacenter."

Wikipedia, naturally, has its own definition.

Cloud computing is Internet based development and use of computer technology. In concept, it is a paradigm shift whereby details are abstracted from the users who no longer need knowledge of, expertise in, or control over the technology infrastructure "in the cloud" that supports them.

Of course, there are different levels of computing that a provider in the Cloud can offer. The usage of a particular software application (eg Google Docs) is just one such offering. Another would be akin to a software development platform (think Google App Engine, Microsoft Azure and Salesforce's force.com). Then, of course, there are the raw infrastructure services - servers provisioned "on-tap" for end-user usage (eg Amazon Ec2).

We are probably all users of Cloud services if we think about it. A quick look inside my Password Safe vault reveals almost 300 different User ID & Password combinations for services on the net including:

• Blogger [blogging platforms]
• Twitter [divulging incoherent thoughts]
• Facebook [staying in touch]
• LinkedIn [professional networking]
• Google Docs [MS Office Alternative]
• Gmail [eMail]
• Screenr [screencasting]
• ChartGo [charting application]

The Enterprise Model
While it is easy to see how personal usage of Cloud applications has grown over recent years, it may come more of a surprise to learn how the Enterprise is adopting Cloud usage.

According to EDL Consulting, 38% of enterprises will be using a SaaS based eMail service by December 2010. Incisive Media report that 12% of Financial Services firms have already adopted SaaS, mainly in the CRM, ERP & HR fields. And our friends at Gartner reckon that one-third of ALL new software will be delivered via the SaaS model by 2010.

My guess? SaaS is already happening in the enterprise. It's here and it's here to stay.

With any change to the enterprise operating model there will be implications - some real and, just as critical, some perceived.

In the Perceived Risks category, I'd place risks such as loss of control; storing business critical data in the Cloud; reliability of the Cloud provider; longevity of the Cloud provider. Of course, these are only perceived risks. Who is to say that storing business critical data in the Cloud is any less risky that storing in the enterprise's own data centre? There may be different attack vectors that need to be mitigated against, but that doesn't mean the data is any less secure, does it? And who says the enterprise has to lose control!

Real risks, however, would include things like the proliferation of employee identities across multiple providers; compliance to company policies; the new attack vectors (already described); privacy management; the legislative impact of data storage locations; and, of course, user management!

Cloud Standards
As with any new IT delivery methodology, a raft of "standards" seem to appear. This is great as long as there is wide-spread adoption of the standards and the big suppliers can settle on a specific standard. Thanks goodness for:

• The Open Cloud Manifesto (http://www.opencloudmanifesto.org/)
• The Cloud Security Alliance (http://www.cloudsecurityalliance.org/)

These guys, at least, are attempting to address the standards issue and I am particularly pleased to see CSA's Domain 13 on Identity & Access Management insisting on the use of SAML, WS-Federation and Liberty ID-FF.

Access Control
And on that point, the various Cloud providers should be congratulated on their adoption of security federation. Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) has been around for over 6 years now and is an excellent way of providing a Single Sign On solution across the enterprise firewall. OpenID, according to Kim Cameron, is now supported by 50,000 sites and 500 million people have an OpenID (even if the majority don't realise it!)

The problem, historically, has been the problem of identity ownership. All major providers want to be the Identity Provider in the "federation" and Relying Parties were few and far between. Thankfully, there has been a marked shift in this stance over the last 12 months (as Kim Cameron's figures support).

Then there are the "brokers". Those companies designed to make the "federation" process a lot less painful. The idea is that a single-authentication to the broker will allow wider access to the SaaS community, as such:

Symplified (http://www.symplified.com/) and Ping Identity (http://www.pingidentity.com/) seem to be the thought leaders in this space and their marketing blurb comes across as comprehensive and impressive. They certainly tick the boxes marked "Speed To Market" and "Usability" but again those perceived risks may be troublesome for the wary enterprise. The "Keys To The Kingdom" issue rears its ugly head once more!

Identity Management
SPML is to identity management as SAML is to access management. Right? Well, almost. Service Provisioning Markup Language (SPML) was first ratified in October 2003 with v2.0 ratified in April 2006. My guess? We need another round of ratification! Let's examine the evidence. Who is currently using it? A Google search returns precious little. Google Apps uses proprietary APIs. Salesforce uses proprietary APIs. Zoho uses proprietary APIs. What is the point of a standard if nobody uses it?

Compliance & Audit
Apparently, forty times more information will be generated during 2009 than during 2008 AND the "digital universe" will be ten times bigger in 2011 than it was in 2006! Those are staggering figures, aren't they? And the bulk of that data will be quite unstructured - like this blog or my tweets!

The need for auditing the information we put out into the digital universe is greater than ever but there is no standards based approach to Compliance & Audit in the Cloud!

Service Providers are the current custodians of the Compliance & Audit process and will likely continue to do so for the time being. Actually, the Service Providers are quite good at this as they already have to comply with many different regulations across many different legislative jurisdictions. Typically, however, they present Compliance & Audit dashboards tailored to vertical markets only.

It's understandable, I guess, that for a multi-tenancy service there will be complications separating out relevant data for the enterprise compliance check.

Moving To The Cloud
There are providers out there who claim to be capable of providing an Identity Management as a Service (IDaaS) which sounds great, doesn't it? Take away all that pain of delivering an enterprise robust IdM solution? In practice, however, it works well for enterprises who operate purely in the Cloud. These solutions already understand the provisioning requirements of the big SaaS operators. What they can't do quite as well, though, is the provisioning back into our enterprise systems! It's not enough to assume that an enterprise runs everything from their Active Directory instance, after all. Also, we have to remember that using an IDaaS is akin to giving away the "Keys To The Kingdom". Remember our perceived risks?

An alternative is to move the enterprise IdM solution into the Cloud. Existing installations of IBM Tivoli Identity Manager or Sun Identity Manager or {insert your favourite vendor here} Identity Manager could be moved to the cloud using the IaaS model - Amazon EC2. The investment in existing solutions would be retained with the added benefit of scalability, flexibility and cost-reduction. Is this a model that can be adopted easily? Most certainly, as long as the enterprise in question can get its head around the notion of moving the "Keys To The Kingdom" beyond its firewall.

Conclusion
The next generation of user is already web-aware - SaaS is here to stay - and SSO is finally within our grasp with only a handful of big players dragging their heels when it comes to implementing standards such as SAML v2.0. It was also intriguing to play with Chrome OS last week (albeit an early prototype version). Integrating desktop sign on with the web just tightens things that bit further (in a Google way, of course).

Provisioning (whether it is Just-In-Time or Pre-Populated) is still the pain-point. Nobody seems to be using SPML and proprietary APIs abound. Nailing this is going to be critical for mass adoption of SaaS solutions.

While Provisioning is the current pain-point, however, Governance, Risk & Compliance will be the next big-ticket agenda item. The lack of standards and proliferation of point solutions will surely start to hurt. Here, though, I run out of ideas.... for now. Seems to me that there is an opportunity for a thought leader in this space!

Learning Authentication

Securing mission critical applications is vitally important. Everyone can agree on that. Securing access to personal information is also vitally important. I'm sure there'll be no arguments with that one either. And I'm also quite sure that there will be no arguing with the fact that not all applications carry the same risk and therefore they can be secured in various manners ranging from pretty insecure to secure to the point where even with all the necessary credentials it is still hard to get access.

When I was young, I had a ZX Spectrum 48Kb. When I switched it on (because in those days I had no concept of “booting”), I was presented with a fairly blank screen and a cursor. At this point, I would normally type LOAD “” and insert a cassette into my attached cassette player. A program would load (normally a game to be fair) and I would enjoy the pleasure of using the program (or playing the game) for quite some time thereafter. No authentication necessary.

These days, our children need to be a lot more careful as they typical use computers in a state of always being connected to the internet. But is it reasonable to expect a young child to enter a User ID and Password when they want to play “Dora The Explorer” on the Cbeebies website? Maybe they should have to authenticate at an early age – after all, it is teaching them good practice, yes?

Well, there's probably no harm in having a child click on a photograph of themselves when it comes to authenticating at the OS level and then getting access to a customised desktop with all their favourite links on it (such as the now infamous Dora) but what about a password?

Would it be fair to ask a child of 10 to construct an eight character password which had to have alphabetic, numeric and symbols in it? They might be able to do that and remember the password. What about a child of 6? What about a child with learning difficulties? I would suggest that a hard to remember password would be inappropriate – especially if all they were trying to access is the aforementioned Dora in her quest to defeat the naughty Sniper!

So what would be an appropriate means for this demographic to learn the beauty of authenticating themselves? Retina recognition? Finger-prints? Visual cues? Let's examine...

Bio-metrics may seem like a fun way of authenticating and it certainly has merit except that not every PC or laptop comes equipped with the necessary hardware to enable it. Should we all rush out and buy finger print readers? I'm thinking not.

Passwords aren't necessarily an option even if we make the passwords very weak indeed. Maybe the children aren't at a stage in their development where they can recognise the characters on the keyboard let alone use the keyboard appropriately.

Visual cues? Consider the scenario whereby the child in question clicks on their own photograph to authenticate and is then presented with four images of animals from which they have to select their favourite. Now, consider the scenario whereby the child is presented with four colours from which they have to select their favourite. All of a sudden, we are actually verifying that there is a good chance that the child is who they say they are. The child is learning the beauty of IT security in a safe environment with visual cues which are protecting non-critical services. The authentication process is probably one of the least secure mechanisms I can think short of no authentication whatsoever. However, in an environment where security doesn't matter and for the benefit of educating the young and getting them used to the concepts of identifying themselves and verifying that they are who they say they are, then it probably has merit. (And no doubt has already been done many times before.)

I spend my life working with IBM Tivoli security products, focussing on Tivoli Access Manager and Tivoli Identity Manager. I haven't come across an EAI for such an authentication mechanism but would imagine it would be easy to implement and could be very useful within learning environments. Maybe I'll write one in my spare time!

So is there a drawback? Of course there is. And it is the same drawback that exists for all user credentials. Setup, user registration or the provisioning process. That issues seems (to me, at least) to rest with the educators who can talk the child through the process and explain the reasons behind it.

Vista v Ubuntu

I had enough of Vista recently. Watching that little blue circle circling and circling and circling. And all the while the hard disk light would flash and flash again and flash once more. But nothing seemed to be happening.

I felt like exacting violence on my laptop and then finally decided that it was time for my workhorse laptop to get the Ubuntu treatment. After all, I'd done it on other machines so why not the machine I work with almost all the time.

The long and short of it is that Ubuntu and Vista are living happily on my ThinkPad and I can boot into either. They both have almost an identical list of applications installed - Apache Directory Studio, MySQL Workbench, Tweetdeck, Filezilla, Password Safe, Firefox, Thunderbird, Picasa, Google Earth, Skype, Open Proj, VMWare Player. I have Open Office rather than Microsoft Office and Kivio rather than Visio; GIMP rather than Photoshop and Pidgin in place of Live Messenger.

Today I was sent a spreadsheet that wouldn't play ball in Open Office so I booted into Vista. What an eye-opener - I hadn't done that in a while and I was so annoyed that I thought I would do it again and run time trials!

Boot-time to logon prompt
Vista: 30 seconds
Ubuntu: 20 seconds

Logon, launch Excel/Openoffice and open spreadsheet
Vista: 53 seconds
Ubuntu: 29 seconds

Shutdown
Vista: 81 seconds
Ubuntu: 9 seconds

Those times are dramatic (especially the shutdown time). But it is even worse when multi-tasking. Launching just a couple of applications within Vista renders it almost impossible to use. I have run CCleaner just 2 weeks ago because the slowness of the machine was so bad. CCleaner made a massive improvement but still not enough to push me towards Linux.

I am looking forward to Windows 7, to be fair. But it would have to be absolutely amazing to convince me to ditch my sleek Ubuntu setup.

SSO Still Hard After All These Years

Web Single Sign On isn't a new technology - it has been around for many years. You would think that the technology community would have this particular challenge "in the bag" yet the evidence of a frustrating day at work today would suggest that this may not be the case.

Authenticating once and accessing multiple web based applications without further authentication challenges is something that most people should be used to be now. Authenticating to Google allows you to access their Mail, Calendar, Docs and Blogger applications without the annoyance of constantly inputting your User ID and Password, right? Similarly, the big boys of the services world have provided us with Siteminder, Tivoli Access Manager for e-Business, Sun Access Manager and various others. In short - techies know what they are doing when it comes to minimising authentication challenges.

WRONG!

It seems that web based applications are still being developed in a manner which overly complicates the SSO capability. Worse still, this is not limited to the part-time developer knocking out PHP based apps in his spare time. The big services companies are not blameless here!

Today, I had to provide a mechanism whereby users could authenticate using a WebSEAL instance (part of the Tivoli Access Manager for e-Business suite) and then SSO their way to the Microsoft Live service for access to Mail and Calendar applications.

An IBM product fronting a Microsoft product? Two big companies committed to the notion of SSO and federation?

Microsoft make the Windows LiveID SSO Kit documentation available online which is great, but the SSO Kit itself is only available upon request via the Microsoft Connect website. That was a bad start but was resolved soon enough by pulling some strings. The documentation details three integration scenarios, two of which assume that the authentication provider will be an IIS based application. As you will have guessed from the requirement (above), IIS plays no part in the solution which leaves us with the third scenario.

The third scenario requires the authentication provider to make a SOAP call to the Windows Live Service in order to retrieve a Short Lived Token which is then passed to the Windows Live Login service.

No big deal, right?

WRONG!

Where is the SOAP service hosted? Where is the WSDL? What parameteres are passed to the SOAP service? These things aren't documented! It's as if Microsoft have assumed that nobody in their right mind would try to do this and the IIS scenarios are the way to go!

The real answer to these questions, of course, is that the information is available - if you are prepared to hunt for it. Hidden in the document is a sentence which states that the implementer should refer to the partner4.xml document for the SOAP service URL. And partner4.xml is where? Well, it's not in the kit! Again, you have to go hunting online for it (and it isn't called partner4.xml either).

To be fair, the documentation to say that if you want to adopt this scenario, you should deconstruct the C# source files provided for the IIS scenarios and write your own routines. The C# source files have limited comments (as you would expect) and there are a number of them. Trawling through source code is now required (and I'm not a C# expert).

While I'm sure that this will eventually work, it seems to me to be too difficult to even gather the information required for the build never mind performing the build. The information is available, but it is certainly not intuitive. So today was an expensive day spent hunting for information and very little progress was made. Maybe tomorrow will be more productive!

For info, the following C# source files are the interesting ones:

• LIVE_SLT.cs
• CredentialServiceAPISOAPServer.cs

No Excuse For Ignorance

We should feel privileged to be alive but feel disappointed that we are going to miss out on so much.

Admittedly, some people's lives are very tough indeed and for many people around the world, hardship, suffering, poverty and hunger dominate.

But I am privileged. I live in the UK with a reasonable job and I have access to things that my parents couldn't have dreamed of. I live on the information super-highway; I have access to knowledge at my finger-tips which means I no longer need to retain the information in my own head. I just need to know where to look for the information.

As an example... I have been watching the latest Virgin Mobile advertisement on television in awe. I say watching, but I really mean listening. The accompanying song is one of the most beautiful sounds I think I've ever heard. I "need" to hear it again. And by the power that I have at my finger tips, I can search for "Virgin Mobile train advertisement song" and the first hit I get back from Google tells me that Mazzy Star performed the song which is called "Into Dust". I fired up Spotify and searched for Mazzy Star and within ~2 minutes of the advert being aired on television, I'm listening to the track.

Just a handful of years ago, the track would've been lost. I would never have found it. I went from having no knowledge of Mazzy Star to elevating "Into Dust" into my Top 10 songs of all time within minutes. The internet has allowed me to no longer feel ignorant.

All of this leads me to my next point. There is no excuse for ignorance anymore. All the information that the lay-person could ever hope to acquire is available. When someone asks me a "how do I" type of question, I'm more inclined to ask them why don't they already know the answer - especially if they are asking me the question over some form of instant messaging tool. Surely asking the question of Google would've been just as easy as asking me the question?

However, I guess the fact that people aren't capable of finding the information they are seeking is the thing that keeps me (and other IT consultants) employed.

BTW: I really do recommend "Into Dust" by Mazzy Star. It's a joy.

ADSI Guru

So the past few days were spent struggling to write a binary attribute into my Active Directory instance. Java isn't too clever when it comes to binary objects yet I seemed to be capable of generating a perfect binary object which I could write into ANY other LDAP compliant repository. Of course, Active Directory is merely LDAPpy - as I christened it yesterday.

Most of my efforts were probably in vain as the IBM Tivoli Identity Manager Active Directory Adapter does not support binary objects. Generating such an object an assigning it to a person record within ITIM would have been futile as would trying to generate the object on the fly during workflow.

The fact still remains that I absolutely must get this binary attribute into Active Directory as part of the provisioning process. And to that end, I wrote my first complete ADSI script today. I've spent years working on unix boxes and working with "real" LDAPs. To be scripting in VBScript and attempting to update AD was rather alien. I learned a thing or too on the way. VBScript desperately needs to know the precise size of your arrays, for example. Java, as we know, is fairly tolerant to lazy coding. VBScript desperately needs object types to be precisely as it expects whereas Java is quite tolerant when it comes to determining the difference between 1, "1" and "one"!

Design
I decided that I could write an ADSI script that would commit these binary objects to my accounts after they had been created with the AD Adapter. But I don't merely want to call this process as part of workflow. I've decided to take it a step further and create a separate service and adapter which will perform this function. ITIM, calling ITDI to write these attributes (which are based on attributes assigned to person objects as strings anyway) and ITDI calling a VBScript to commit the write.

Args
My ADSI script take command line arguments, of course. Things like the bind DN & password; the target AD instance; the target user; the raw data to be converted into binary. I'm pleased with the args processing. Not quite the way I would do it in shell scripting, but easy enough:

Dim args
Dim sBindUID

Set args = WScript.Arguments.Named
sBindUID = args.Item("bindUID")

I can now call the script as such:

cscript myscript.vbs /bindUID:Administrator

Binding
Next, I bound to the AD instance using scripting methods I found by Googling:

Dim oDS
Dim oAuth
Dim oConn
Set oDS = GetObject("LDAP:")
Set oAuth = oDS.OpenDSObject(sServer, sBindDN, sPassword, &H0200)
Set oConn = CreateObject("ADODB.Connection")
oConn.Provider = "ADsDSOObject"
oConn.Open "Active Directory Provider", sBindDN, sPassword

And then attempted to find the target for my update:

sSearchObject = "<" & sServer & ">;(" & sTarget & ");name,ADsPath;subtree"
set oRS = oConn.Execute(sSearchObject)
Set oUser = GetObject(oRS.Fields(1).Value)
oUser.GetInfo

Updating
Then came the tricky bit. I had a multi-valued attribute which required each attribute to be converted into a binary stream. I shan't bore you with the binary conversion as it is convoluted in the extreme. However, the multi-valued issue required use of the PutEx method:

oUser.PutEx ADS_PROPERTY_UPDATE, "mybinaryattribute", aEntityGUIDs

And, of course, my aEntityGUIDs object need to be an array of a size equal to the number of values in the array. Time for some Redim. Redim, of course, is not something I've ever had to do in Java! A goodly two hours were spent pondering my failure to commit my values to AD before it dawned on me that the size of the array may have an impact.

I tarted up the code to add a logging mechanism. ERROR, FATAL, WARN, INFO and DEBUG messages are written to a log file by calling a little function that includes this code:

Stuff = dateStamp & ": " & loggedString
Set myFSO = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
Set WriteStuff = myFSO.OpenTextFile("myvbs.log", 8, True)
WriteStuff.WriteLine(Stuff)
WriteStuff.Close

I'm not 100% sure but I'm fairly convinced that others would be fit to declare themselves VBScript/ADSI gurus. I shan't do likewise but I now have a better understanding of the pitfulls of VBScripting AD access.

NOTES
I haven't shown all the Dim statements for the objects defined in the code above - I'm sure you can work that out for yourself.