Posts tagged with: rdfauth

Update: Dan Brickley suggested (in a private mail to Henry and me) that "RDFAuth" is most probably not a very smart name anyway, as something that contains official/generic technologies (RDF and oAuth in this case) may send wrong signals and cause misunderstanding. And that we shouldn't waste time fighting. He suggests more specific names (BeatnikAuth/knoweeAuth) for the time being, as this is all still premature stuff, and because no one should claim to have created an "RDFAuth", especially not if it isn't backed by the whole community. Well, what can I say, he's of course right. I apologize and will s/RDFAuth/knoweeAuth/ from now on.

You may have read Henry Story's recent post about RDFAuth, an RDF-oriented mechanism to access (partly) protected web resources. He's not describing the RDFAuth protocol, though. I've tried to clarify things a couple of times on the semantic-web list, but somehow he seems to prefer to hijack the name instead, together with parts of the idea and claim it as his invention (it's not mine either, to make things clear). Now, innovation is always based on a combination of prior work and improvements, but his "following my strict architectural guidelines, I came across what I am just calling RDFAuth" preening goes a tiny bit too far to not trigger a comment.

What he describes (a PGP-based authentication protocol) is clearly interesting, but it's simply not what RDFAuth, an idea that was developed in the knowee project, is about. For knowee (which just released the alpha version, btw), we needed something that can be implemented on basic, shared web servers. PGP is simply not an option (if considered mandatory). People won't upload their private keys to 3rd party servers, and PGP libs are not necessarily available in those environments either.

Final clarifications:

• RDFAuth may support PGP, it's just not a requirement.
• I'm pretty sure that Henry's PGP-only approach will attract more SemWeb geeks than RDFAuth, it just wouldn't necessarily work for knowee's target audience.
• The RDFAuth idea is in no way special or new. It more or less predates oAuth, but long-term-ish I'll most probably have to replace it with oAuth, once there is a way to generate tokens without the browser redirect dance (fully server-side token generation is another knowee requirement).
• I read about a token-based, decentralized identification mechanism on a very early OpenID FAQ page that described a non-browser-dependent way to log into web sites. I can't find the link anymore, but this is basically what RDFAuth is based on. So, this is not my idea either.
• The possibility of combining 200 OK response headers with WWW-Authenticate was suggested by Etan Wexler on the FOAF mailing list
• Dan Brickley explored SPARQL-based group membership discovery a while back. I like this idea of de-coupling data exchange decisions from the identification/authorisation process very much (RDFers don't need things like sReg or Attribute Exchange).
• The only thing that RDFAuth adds is light-weight, personal token services (as a replacement of OpenID's browser-based identification), and the re-use of straight HTTP BasicAuth, so that partly protected resources can more easily be discovered by both server-side and client-side tools (e.g. Tabulator), and also to allow widely deployed modules like mod_php to access the login token and client identifier using built-in functionality. And I doubt that layering a protocol on top of HTTP BasicAuth hasn't been done before, so, again, nothing special to brag about here.

OK, enough geek whining ;), don't want to waste more time of my precious weekend.