Here is something to keep an eye on. Yesterday, we posted a tip entitled, Quick Tip: Use PasswordSafe, about free software you can use to easily keep track of the hundreds of user ID/passwords pairs that go along with the ever-growing number of secure websites that are now an indispensable part of our lives. The fact that each of these websites requires a separate registration is a major inconvenience. PasswordSafe does an admirable job of alleviating the symptom, but what about the root cause?

Well, great strides are being made in the area of single sign-on authentication (SSO) for websites. Microsoft introduced one SSO solution, called CardSpace (formerly code named InfoCard), with the launch of Vista. Independently, an SSO solution called OpenID has been evolving in the open-source world, and just last month, Microsoft announced that they will be embracing OpenID as well. (Microsoft says that OpenID has a vulnerability to phishing, but they’ll help to work towards plugging it.) OpenID was initiated by Brad Fitzpatrick of LiveJournal. AOL, Digg, Wikipedia, and Technoratti have all announced plans to adopt it.

The basic premise with both CardSpace and OpenID is that instead of having to create a separate identity for every website visited, a person would create just a handful of identities, one for each area of their life (work, school, hobby, dating), and those identities would be reusable. This is exciting news. As you can imagine, it will greatly reduce the problem that PasswordSafe addresses, but not entirely. For one thing, PasswordSafe will still be great for keeping track of the OpenID identities themselves. Also, there will always be non-website entries to track (serial numbers, registration codes, etc.).

References: wikipedia.org/wiki/Openid, wikipedia.org/wiki/CardSpace.

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