CONNECTED IDENTITY: BENEFITS, RISKS, AND CHALLENGES - …

BY FRANK LEYMANN

CONNECTED IDENTITY: BENEFITS, RISKS, AND CHALLENGESBY PRABATH SIRIWARDENADIRECTOR - SECURITY ARCHITECTURE, WSO2

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. Introduction................................................................................................................................................

2. Breaking Silos in a Connected Business..........................................................................................

3. Identity Broker Pattern Benefits........................................................................................................

4. Identity Broker: Key Fundamentals...................................................................................................

5. Conclusion...................................................................................................................................................

6. References...................................................................................................................................................

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CONNECTED IDENTITY: BENEFITS, RISKS, AND CHALLENGES ©2016 WSO2

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1. INTRODUCTION

Today, the global Internet economy is estimated to be around of $10 trillion US dollars; in

the next couple of years, almost half the world’s population (about 3 billion people) is set

to get their hands on the Internet. And it doesn’t just end there - in 2008, the number of

things connected to the Internet exceeded the number of people on earth. To put this into

perspective, over 12.5 billion devices were connected to the Internet in 2012. It is estimated

that at least 50 billion devices will be connected to the Internet by end-2020.

Connected devices have existed in one form or another since the introduction of the first

computer network and consumer electronics. However, global connectivity started to take

shape only after the Internet emerged. In the 1990s the possible communication between

people and machines and interaction via machines was only a concept; today it’s a reality

that’s continuing to evolve.

The concept of ‘identity’ is not confined to just humans anymore, but rather represents both

humans and ‘things’. The identity of things (IDoT) is an effort that involves assigning unique

identifiers (UID) with associated metadata to devices and objects (things), enabling them

to connect and communicate effectively with other entities over the Internet.

The metadata associated with the unique identifier collectively defines the identity of an

endpoint. IDoT is an essential component of the Internet of things (IoT), in which almost

anything imaginable can be addressed and networked for exchange of data online. In this

context, a thing can be any entity, both physical and logical objects, that has a unique

identifier and has the ability to transfer data over a network.

The definition of identity has evolved with IoT and cannot be defined by just attributes or

claims. It can be further refined by patterns or behaviors. Yet, the complete picture of a

given entity’s identity is unavailable. Moreover, the privacy of data migration and ownership

is another challenge we face in today’s connected world. For example, the connected car is

among the millions of Internet-connected devices available today - it can collect and store a

vast amount of data that can go well beyond the vehicle owner’s personal preferences and

settings; the car can collect driver data such as travel routes, travel destinations, car speeds,

driver behavior, and commute patterns among many other nuggets of information.

All of the data collected and stored by these IoT devices are helping to create a “virtual

identity” for each and every user. While this user-generated data will most likely last forever,

connected cars and all the other Internet-connected devices will eventually phase out.

In the context of the connected car, it would lead to important questions concerning car

owners and their data, such as how and where this data is stored, the fate of the already

collected data when the owner buys a new car, and the possibility of transferring this data

to another connected car even if the car is built by a different manufacturer. Connected car

data and user preferences are primarily stored in cloud-based silos.


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There are no universal standards or best practices among car manufacturers or industry

players for collecting, storing, and managing data of connected car owners. Moreover,

there are no universal standards or best practices to manage the ‘identity’ of connected car

owners, which includes the storage and export of personal preferences and user history.

2. BREAKING SILOS IN A CONNECTED BUSINESS

Identity silos create a lot of friction in the connected business. One way to reduce friction,

while keeping data in silos as well as the ownership of data is to expose identity data

via APIs to help users establish a clear identity. By doing this, they would be able to, for

instance, relate driving patterns with sleeping patterns or daily food consumption patterns

with sleeping patterns, etc. The impending challenge, however, is propagating end-user

identity across these APIs; therefore, building a protocol agnostic security model is key

to ensure connected identity. The security model of one entity should be compatible with

other connected devices. This would amount to building a point-to-point security model

that would lead to the spaghetti identity anti-pattern.

Identity silos and spaghetti identity anti-patterns are not only present in the IoT world.

Even in the past, most enterprises have expanded via acquisitions, mergers, and

partnerships, thereby including more external users into their system. An analyst firm has

even predicted that by 2020 around 60% of all digital identities interacting with enterprises

will come from external identity providers.

Each external identity provider can be treated as an identity silo and identity data is

shared via APIs. The identity consumer, or service provider, must trust the identity provider

to accept a given user identity. Beyond the trust, both the service provider and identity

provider must speak the same language to establish trust and then transport identity

data. In the case of a service provider that doesn’t comply with the identity token sharing

protocol supported by the identity provider, you would either need to fix the identity

provider’s end to speak the same language of the service provider, or vice versa.

3. IDENTITY BROKER PATTERN BENEFITS

The connected business space today involves a very dynamic environment. An enterprise’s

goal is to reach out to as many customers, partners, distributors, and suppliers that would

result in more business interactions and subsequently translate to revenue growth. Their

ultimate goal, however, should be to make the business more accessible and reactive rather

than just simply integrating technological silos. Ensuring there’s no friction in building

connections between business entities comes at a price and with certain limitations - the

cost of provisioning a service provider or an identity provider into the system could be high

due to protocol incompatibilities. In addition, building point-to-point trust relationships

between service providers and identity providers is not scalable.


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With the identity bus or the identity broker pattern, a given service provider is not

coupled to a specific identity provider as well as to a given federation protocol. The broker

maintains the trust relationships between each entity as well as identity tokens between

multiple heterogeneous security protocols. It can further enforce access controlling,

auditing, and monitoring. Given the ongoing evolution in standards for identity federation

and the lack of proper standards to manage and propagate device identities, the identity

broker will play a key role in building a common, connected identity platform in a protocol

agnostic manner.

The identity broker pattern has the following key benefits:

• Frictionless introduction of a new service provider - This requires the enterprise to

register the service provider at the identity bus and at that point pick the identity

providers it trusts. It doesn’t need to add the service provider configuration to each

and every identity provider.

• Frictionless removal of an existing service provider - The user would need to remove

the service provider from the identity bus and it’s not required to remove the service

provider from each and every identity provider.

• Frictionless introduction of a new identity provider - The user would need to register

the identity provider at the identity bus and it will be available to any service provider.

• Easy removal of an existing identity provider - The user would need to remove the

identity provider from the identity bus.

• Frictionless enforcing of new authentication protocols - In the event the enterprise

needs to authenticate users with both username/password and duo-security (SMS-

based authentication), it would only need to add that capability to the identity bus

and at that point pick the required set of authentication protocols against a given

service provider at the time of service provider registration. Each service provider can

pick how it wants to authenticate users at the identity bus.

• Claim transformations - The service provider may read the user’s email address from

the http://sp1.org/claims/email attribute ID, but the identity provider of the user may

send it as http://idp1.org/claims/emai. The identity bus can transform the claims it

receives from the identity provider to the format expected by the service provider.

• Role mapping - The service provider needs to authorize users once they are logged

in. What the user can do at the identity provider is different from what the same user

can do at the service provider. The user’s roles from the identity provider define what

he/she can do at the identity provider. The service provider’s roles define the things a

user can do at the service provider. The identity bus is capable of mapping the identity

provider’s roles to the service provider’s roles. For example a user may bring an idp-

admin role from his identity provider in a SAML response and the identity bus will find

the mapped service provider role corresponding to this (e.g. sp-admin) and will add

that into the SAML response that will return to the service provider from the identity

bus.


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• Just-in-time provisioning - Given the identity bus is at the forefront of all identity

transactions, it can provision all external user identities to an internal user store.

• Centralized monitoring and auditing and centralized access control.

• Easy introduction of a new federation protocol - If an enterprise has a service provider

or an identity provider that supports a proprietary federation protocol, you only need

to add that capability to the identity bus.

4. IDENTITY BROKER: KEY FUNDAMENTALS

The following fundamentals should ideally be supported by an identity broker to be able to

meet future identity and access management requirements:

• Federationprotocolagnostic - As illustrated in Figure 1, this should not be

coupled with a specific protocol like SAML, OpenID Connect, WS-Federation, etc.

WSO2 Identity Server (WSO2 IS) enables connecting to multiple identity as well as

service providers over heterogeneous identity federation protocols, and transform ID

tokens between multiple heterogeneous federation protocols.

Figure 1

• Transportprotocolagnostic - This should not be coupled with a specific transport

protocol like HTTP or MQTT and should have the ability to read from and write to

multiple transport channels (Figure 2).


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SAML, OIDC,OpenID, OAuth2.0, WS-Federation

SAML, OIDC,OpenID, OAuth2.0, WS-Federation

WSO2 IS

http://wso2.com/products/identity-server/

Figure 2

• Authenticationprotocolagnostic-As explained in Figure 3, this should not be couple

with a specific authentication protocol, username/password, FIDO, OTP, etc. It should

also include pluggable authenticators.

Figure 3

• Claimtransformation- It should have the ability to transform identity provider specific

claims into service provider specific claims and vice versa, thus supporting simple

claim as well as complex transformations, e.g. a complex claim transformation would

be to derive the age from the date-of-birth identity provider claim - or concatenate

first name and last name claims from the identity provider to form the full name

service provider claim (Figure 4).


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User store

WSO2 IS

UsernamesPassword

Facebook

Duo Secuurity

FIDD

MePin

HTTP, MQTTWSO2 ISHTTP, MQTT

Figure 4

• Homerealmdiscovery-As shown in Figure 5, it should have the ability to find the

home identity provider that corresponds with the incoming federation request by

looking at certain attributes in the request. The discovery process should be pluggable

and ensure filter-based routing.

Figure 5

• Multi-optionauthentication- It should have the ability to present multiple login

options to the user by the service provider. Based on the service provider who initiates

the authentication request, the identity broker will present login options to the user

(Figure 6).


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http://sp1/firstName

http://idp1/firstName

WSO2 IS

foo.com

WSO2 IS

hrd-foo.com

Figure 6

• Multi-stepauthentication-It should have the ability to present multiple step

authentication (MFA) to the user by the service provider. MFA is an instance of

multiple step authentication where you plug in authenticators that support multi-

factor authentication into any of the steps (Figure 7).

Figure 7

• Adaptiveauthentication-As described in Figure 8, the ability to change

authentication options based on the context should be available. The identity broker

should also have the ability to derive context from the authentication request itself as

well as from other supportive data.


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UsernamesPassword

WSO2 IS

SP1

WSO2 IS

WSO2 IS

SP1

SP2

WSO2 IS

Figure 8

• Identitymapping-It should have the ability to map identities between different

identity providers; the user should be able to maintain multiple identities with various

identity providers and switch between identities when logging into multiple service

providers (Figure 9).

Figure 9


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UsernamesPassword

WSO2 IS WSO2 IS

+

SP1

• Multipleattributestores-As illustrated in Figure 10, it should have the ability to

connect to multiple attribute stores and build an aggravated view of the end-user’s

identity.

Figure 10

•Just-in-timeprovisioning-It should have the ability to provision users to connected

user stores in a protocol agnostic manner (Figure 11).

Figure 11


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WSO2 ISSP1

WSO2 IS

SPIdP

•Manageidentityrelationships-As shown in Figure 12, it should have the ability to

manage identity relationships between different entities and, based on this, take

authentication and authorization decisions. A given user can belong to a group or role,

and be the owner of devices of multiple platforms; a device could have an owner, an

administrator, a user, and so on.

Figure 12

•Trustbrokering- Each service provider should identify which identity providers it

trusts (Figure 13).

Figure 13


12

WSO2 IS

SP1

SP2

WSO2 IS

•Centralizedaccesscontrol-This component refers to who gets access to which user

attribute and the specific service provider’s resources the user can access (Figure 14).

Figure 14

•Centralizedmonitoring- It should have the ability to monitor and generate statistics

on each identity transaction and ensure it flows through the broker. WSO2’s analytics

platform, WSO2 Data Analytics Server (DAS), offers a connected analytics engine that

can carry out batch, real-time, and predictive analytics (Figure 15).

Figure 15


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Idp

SP

WSO2 IS

WSO2 DAS

PDP

Idp

SP

WSO2 IS

PDP

http://wso2.com/products/data-services-server/

WSO2 Identity Server provides a comprehensive security model based on OAuth 2.0 to

secure access to APIs. Further, the XACML 3.0 support in WSO2 Identity Server can be

leveraged to build a fine-grained access control model. WSO2 Identity Server along with

WSO2 API Manager can build a comprehensive API security ecosystem for an enterprise.

5. CONCLUSION

Connected devices is not a concept anymore. In fact, it’s evolving at a dynamic pace.

Enterprises too need to adapt and find ways to manage the challenges that follow too.

Ultimately, an enterprise’s goal is to increase and expand business interactions with the

parties it deals with and eventually translate these to revenue growth. The real challenge,

however, is to find ways to make their businesses more accessible and reactive rather

than just simply integrating technological silos. When doing so, security and identity

management plays a critical role in efforts to enhance end-user experience.

WSO2 efficiently undertakes the complex task of identity management across enterprise

applications, services, and APIs by utilizing the full breadth of the WSO2 platform. The

WSO2 open source model avoids vendor lock-in and enables integration across systems,

acting as a fully functional enterprise identity bus.

6. REFERENCES

• The Internet of Things (The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series), http://www.

amazon.com/Internet-Things-Press-Essential-Knowledge/dp/0262527731

• Future Crimes: Everything Is Connected, Everyone Is Vulnerable and What We Can Do

About It, http://www.amazon.com/Future-Crimes-Everything-Connected-Vulnerable/

dp/0385539002

• http://www.programmableweb.com/news/identity-and-access-management-iam-will-

greatly-impact-future-connected-car-sales/analysis/2014/08/20


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http://wso2.com/products/identity-server/

http://wso2.com/api-management/try-it

http://www.amazon.com/Internet-Things-Press-Essential-Knowledge/dp/0262527731

http://www.amazon.com/Internet-Things-Press-Essential-Knowledge/dp/0262527731

http://www.amazon.com/Future-Crimes-Everything-Connected-Vulnerable/dp/0385539002

http://www.amazon.com/Future-Crimes-Everything-Connected-Vulnerable/dp/0385539002

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ABOUT WSO2

Check out more WSO2WhitePapers and WSO2CaseStudies.

For more information about WSO2 products and services,

please visit http://wso2.com or email [email protected]


PrabathSiriwardena

Director - Security Architecture,

WSO2

Prabath has over 11 years of industry experience that currently involves providing security

architecture solutions to many of WSO2’s key customers. He has spoken at several global

user conferences including ApacheCon, OSCON, QCon, WSO2Con, and European Identity

Conference, among others. He has also authored four books related to Apache Maven,

enterprise integration, and API security. Prabath is an Apache Axis2 PMC member as well

as a member of OASIS Identity Metasystem Interoperability (IMI) TC,OASIS eXtensible

Access Control Markup Language (XACML) TC, OASIS Security Services (SAML) TC, OASIS

Identity in the Cloud TC and OASIS Cloud Authorization (CloudAuthZ) TC.

WSO2 is the only company that provides a completely integrated enterprise application

platform for enabling a business to build and connect APIs, applications, web services,

iPaaS, PaaS, software as a service, and legacy connections without having to write code;

using big data and mobile; and fostering reuse through a social enterprise store. Only with

WSO2 can enterprises use a family of governed secure solutions built on the same code

base to extend their ecosystems across the cloud and on mobile devices to employees,

customers, and partners in anyway they like. Hundreds of leading enterprise customers

across every sector—health, financial, retail, logistics, manufacturing, travel, technology,

telecom, and more—in every region of the world rely on WSO2’s award-winning, 100% open

source platform for their mission-critical applications. To learn more, visit http://wso2.com

or check out the WSO2 community on the WSO2 Blog, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook.

http://wso2.com/whitepapers/

http://wso2.com/casestudies/

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CONNECTED IDENTITY: BENEFITS, RISKS, AND CHALLENGES - …