Microsoft Opens Up Windows Live ID

randommsdev writes "Microsoft has announced the release of Windows Live ID Web Authentication. This means that WLID (formerly known as Passport) is now opened to third party websites to use as their authentication system. Any Windows Live user can potentially log in to a website that implements Web Authentication. Interestingly sample implementations are available in the Ruby, Python, Perl, and PHP open source languages amongst others — tested on openSUSE 10.2 but expected to work on any platform that supports these languages. More details are available in the SDK documentation."

ATTN: Top-posting whores

[Anonymous Coward]

Put your comments below this one.
 

Re:ATTN: Top-posting whores

[Anonymous Coward]

What is top posting?

Thanks!

Put your comments below this one.

w00t!

[doxology (636469)]

urls gone wlid!

How long

[afidel (530433)]

Until the first site with a fake passport login form shows up? I mean before semi-intelligent people weren't going to enter their passport ID into non-MS websites, but now... I bet a lot more corporate keys get exposed this way as passport is the keys to your Enterprise Licensing kingdom.

Re:How long

[smashin234 (555465)]

This has been done many times in the past, and I am sure it will continue to happen. Most common were the times that people would set-up false bank of america websites and people would type in their account information....perfect set-up. What was even better was that these sites sometimes were set to bankofamrica.com or some slight variation of the site, so the common user would have no idea they were at the wrong site.

Well there are safeguards for this now, and I am sure if it gets to be a problem like that was at one time, it will also get fixed.

Re:How long

[jamesh (87723)]

Well there are safeguards for this now, and I am sure if it gets to be a problem like that was at one time, it will also get fixed.

The safeguards only work if the user is paying attention. It only takes a fraction of a percent of people to click a 'log in here with your bank of america credentials to see if you have won a prize' link and the scammers can make a profit, and will keep on scamming.

Still... if you've got a way around this that is truly idiot proof, I'd like to hear it! The best thing I can come up with is that the banks themselves initiate the scam, and then send 'the boys' around to break the thumbs of anyone who falls for it, or otherwise punish the scammee (that's strange... my spell check says scammee isn't a valid word...).

Re:How long

[arivanov (12034)]

'log in here with your bank of america credentials to see if you have won a prize'. As a matter of fact this is the latest and probably the most successfull class of phishing sites. The ruse is a "survey" on behalf of "Bank of America" or someone else. It is surprising how many people fall for it. The website has nothing to do with the bank, the addresses are not the bank ones, but none the less the consumer enters their credentials. As a results of many years of brainwashing by direct marketeers they now consider all this to be "business as usual".

Re:How long

[hawkinspeter (831501)]

Whenever I've gone to a bank, they just wear suits and business clothes. Why is the wardrobe department involved with this? I'm confused.

Re:How long

[macbort (224663)]

Google and Yahoo have both been offering similar services for awhile now, I believe, and I don't remember hearing either of them having this problem. Not to say it couldn't happen, but I imagine they've thought about this situation and have accounted for it somehow.

Re:

[mgblst (80109)]

Oh, ok, I guess everything is alright then. They have probably thought of all the problems, and everything will be fine, thanks macbort. How foolish of us to question something like this! Moron.

Re:How long

[jamesh (87723)]

I would love to have a 'single sign-on' and forever forget the hassle of remembering and entering passwords, but the flaw you mention and many others mean I don't think it will ever work. The value of pwning someone's 'single sign-on' code (whether it is Microsoft or some other solution) is just too high.

If a 'single sign-on' became everyone's only method of authenticating to anything, then it would make identity theft just too easy.

You can go to extreme lengths to protect all the sign-on pages in the world, but as long as there are people who will click on a 'your account will be deleted in 2 days unless you go to http://i.am.going.to.steal.your.identity.com/verif y.php [identity.com]' link in an email, none of it matters.

I can't think of any way of preventing that problem without there still being the possibility of a "man in the middle" attack...

Re:

[JonathanR (852748)]

Two Factor [wikipedia.org] authentication using a security token (like the RSA SecurID tokens).

Re:

[jombeewoof (1107009)]

Software tokens are terrible, they fail much more often than not. SecurID tokens are the best thing to happen to computers since parc. The greatest thing is the simplicity, a random number shot through an algorithm changed every 60 seconds. If the numbers don't match you don't get in. They're simple to resync if the two sides fall out of skew. And reasonably difficult to counterfeit. In a few years(decades) the price will come down and you'll have one of these for just about everything. Your bank, your job

Re:How long

[LiquidCoooled (634315)]

You are right.
Just sign into http://paypalhardware.com/ [paypalhardware.com] with your credentials and they will send one out to you :)

Re:

[swillden (191260)]

The _only_ way I can think of for the second factor to completely solve all the problems is that if it is a device that you connect to the network, and it establishes a secure session between the end points

Another way is to use a cryptographic challenge-response authentication, with the relying site's URL hashed into the challenge.

Since the relying site never actually receives the secret key used to create the response, phishing sites gain nothing useful when they prompt the user for authentication. And since the site the user is authenticating to is hashed into the challenge (by an authentication tool on the user's machine, not by the relying site), a response give to a phishing page will not provide ac

Re:How long

[baboonlogic (989195)]

There is nothing in a single sign on system to force you to use only one id. Using openid and the few sites that actually allow you to use it, I have already brought down my username password combos needed from about 10 to 2. So I can decrease the number of sign ons with systems like openid.

Secondly, as far as identity theft is concerned, my email accounts are already single points for attack. Once you have the email, the password recovery services will do your bidding. A single-identity-solution allows you to just shift this from email to some server which was created to keep and handle this data. Whats more you could be the one setting up that server... (not in the ms case but in the case of openid).

So, on the whole, single sign ons can work and openid hopefully will. I dont even want to rtfa. If I cant decide who keeps my username password for my single signon, I am just not interested.

Re:

[swillden (191260)]

I haven't looked at openid, but if it allows you to trust someone else with your keys, it's just plain missing on the most important concept.

You should look into OpenID. It's a simple but very powerful concept, and well worth your time.

OpenID is open both with respect to the choice of authentication server (you can pick any one you want, including running your own if you prefer), and with respect to the choice of authentication technology. In a nutshell, the way it works is that if site A wants to authenticate you, you enter your OpenID, which looks like "username.hostname", where hostname is the name of the OpenID provider server. Call t

Re:How long

[SgtChaireBourne (457691)]

[How long] Until the first site with a fake passport login form shows up? ...

It doesn't matter so much, it's not like MS WLID, formerly known as MS Passport can ever be made secure. It's fundamentally flawed from the design [avirubin.com].

However, all the bad press was about MS Passport, so a simple name change and, Voila, no bad press about the product. Palladium was sanitize the same way.

It's much easier than that

[QuantumG (50515)]

Go to Hotmail [hotmail.com]. You will see that Hotmail now requires you to login with Windows Live ID. Now, take a look at this page. It's a login page. They want you to enter your ID and your password. This is what gives you access to all the different services that are currently integrated with Windows Live ID, and will be integrated in the future. It's basically your "master password". Thing I'm trying to stress here: you shouldn't just give this out to anyone who asks. Ok, you get the idea.

So, first check you should do whenever you're logging into a page is what? That's right, check the url. "http://login.live.com/login.srf?wa=wsignin1.0&rps nv=10&c...." etc. Great, login.live.com, that's what I expect. Cool. Ok, so what's the second thing I should check? Anyone? Come on, it's web password security 101 here people. What do I need to check before I enter a login/password on a web site? That's right.. I need to check I'm on an SSL secured page. The url should start with what? https right? And I should look for the little lock in my browser window.. and if I'm feeling especially paranoid I should check the security certificate to see whether or not it is valid, not expired, and for the site that I am expecting.

This page has none of those things. Well done Microsoft.

Oh, but it gets better. There's this link that says "Use enhanced security". I would have thought that "enhanced" security was a sensible default, silly me. It's not underlined, so you don't know it is a link until you hover your mouse over it, but it will take you to a https:/// [https] page. Of course, the certificate it offers you is not for login.live.com, it's for graphics.hotmail.com. If you accept this certificate then you are basically saying that you're ok with trusting this data that didn't come from graphics.hotmail.com as if it did come from graphics.hotmail.com. Just for the hell of it, let's fire up this "enhanced security" page in IE and see what happens. Oh.. I see. We get no warnings. In fact, if we double click on the padlock we see that the certificate now IS for live.login.com. Hmm, what's going on here. Ahh, I see, half the content on this page didn't come from live.login.com, it came from graphics.hotmail.com.. so this isn't a secure site *at all*, it's a mixed domain site and IE's pitiful support for multiple certificates on a single page is happy to just ignore this (and doesn't even warn you).

XSS anyone?

Re:It's much easier than that

[discHead (3226)]

You forgot the part about keeping a sharply-peeled eye and making sure you are being served by live.com and not 1ive.com (with a numeral 1).

OpenID got this right.

[Poromenos1 (830658)]

At least with OpenID anyone can use their own server, so a phisher wouldn't know what to make the phishing page look like. They could spoof a few known providers, but the one I use (myopenid.com) has an option to not let you log in from a different site. It gives you a page telling you to manually open a new window and log into that and then click the link to continue. That takes care of phishing...

Re:It's much easier than that

[shutdown -p now (807394)]

You're a moron. How the hell did this idiot get modded up? Seriously?? The page you were served is http. The page you will post to for the login session https.

He's not saying that it doesn't use SSL to log in. He's saying that, as a user, he has no way to find it out until after he clicks "Submit" (and no, checking the HTML source code is not a serious option to consider). The convention for such things is that you use secure connection for the login form as well, so that the browser can indicate that it is secure (padlock icon, green or yellow address bar, etc - depends on the browser, but IE, Firefox and Opera all have such indicators).

Re:

[biocute (936687)]

Hasn't MS already got a solution?

All these partner sites must display a "Genuine Live" hologram GIF image.

Beat that!

Got it backwards.

[twitter (104583)]

before semi-intelligent people weren't going to enter their passport ID into non-MS websites, but now... I bet a lot more corporate keys get exposed this way as passport is the keys to your Enterprise Licensing kingdom.

Hmmm, massive FUD has much inertia. First, intelligent people have known for a long time not to trust M$ with anything. This has harmed the online economy, but that's a different story. If the 25% prevalence of keyloggers is not enough, a rogue site has been able to harvest Passport IDs

Phishing?

[FliesLikeABrick (943848)]

What keeps anyone from creating a site (and/or spamming for it), saying it uses Windows Live authentication, then just farming a giant pile of logins they can sell or use for evil things?

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Whats to prevent them from doing it right now, without the release of the system by Microsoft? I can already create a fake Google account, Live, or numerous other login systems on any website I own, it is ultimately up to the user to beware.

Re:

[FliesLikeABrick (943848)]

Yeah but then you'll only get morons. Now people have a reason to believe that it is real

No License?

[originalhack (142366)]

Great... it's copyrighted and provides no license.

Re:No License?

[QuantumG (50515)]

Yup, grab the php package, you will see:

Copyright (c) 2007 Microsoft Corporation. All Rights Reserved.

and yeah, no license. So I guess implicitly you're not allowed to redistribute it at all.

just read the ToU

[Karma Sucks (127136)]

The ToU is on the downloads page: https://msm.live.com/app/tou.aspx [live.com]

Re:

[QuantumG (50515)]

The terms of use don't say anything about the copyright on the sample code. In fact, they don't say anything about the sample code at all.

Now we can all use Windows security - via the web!

[greenguy (162630)]

There's no possible way anything could go wrong with this plan.

Article placement

[Infonaut (96956)]

Is it just me, or does placing this article directly above the Diebold rebranding article make you think of a theme common to both? Company loses credibility. Keeps trying to regain it, but still doesn't grok that you can't just make it *look* like you've changed your spots. You actually have to change your behavior, and regaining credibility takes a lot longer than destroying it does.

CardSpace?

[ZSO (912576)]

Does this mean they've given up on CardSpace [wikipedia.org], which is built into Vista right now? I thought it was a much better solution to the need for single sign-on. Check out thechannel9 video [msdn.com].

Re:

[Shados (741919)]

Different purposes. CardSpace, part of .NET 3.0 and up, is made as a way to authenticate and share data on a site by site basis, as opposed to the central system of Live ID. One could say Cardspace is a "mini-LifeID" thing, so to speak. Still quite useful if implemented right.

Uh, what?

[misleb (129952)]

I thought Passport was outted years ago as being fundamentally broken. Why would I want to implement it on my site? Did they fix it? If not, why are they still using it at all?

-matthew

Re:

[QuantumG (50515)]

They forced all the hotmail users and all the xbox users and all the other users of Microsoft services to sign up, so they figure they've got a nice big market share now.

OpenID

[jediknil (1090345)]

I'd prefer to see the rise of OpenID [openid.net]. Now if Microsoft gave you an OpenID authentication point with your LiveID (preferably with something simple, like adding the OpenID <link> tags to login.live.com or even just live.com), that would be a feature worth using and supporting. And wouldn't require changing the sites that already support OpenID, including, AFAIK, the SixApart family of blogs.

With modern technology, diverse applications are a good thing (healthier market and better apps from consumer selection). Information, however, is more useful the more widely it can be read and used. Unless you are specifically trying to hide something.

Unfortunately, like Live ID, there seems to be more OpenID providers than servers that use them for authentication.

Re:

[SolitaryMan (538416)]

It is worth noting, that OpenID is a decentralized system, so you don't have to depend on single ID provider.

My old single sign-on method

[ls671 (1122017)]

I use 3 passwords for all sites I access mapping to 3 levels of trust. I try to use the same user id when possible :

Level 1 : risky

Level 2 : less risky

Level 3 : almost trustable

For sites that I really trust (banking, etc...) I use dedicated passwords. I, also, can forecast problems with a single sign-on scheme that would be more or less like giving away your social security number if hacked.

I have been working on this problematic before for big organizations and one conclusion we came up with was that we needed to re-use the old assembly language "indirection" principle, called pointers in higher level languages.

So basically, one has to be able to authenticate with multiples set of usernames/passwords combinations. Once the unique user is authenticated, the central authentication authority limits its role to just that, authenticating the user.

All authorization is managed by the local system that interacts with the user.

Do a search for MBUN on Google. In Canada, a user can have multiple MBUNs to deal with the government. This solution was implemented to cope with privacy concerns and still allow the citizen to deal with the government with the same level of privacy that was previously achieved with paper forms. Basically, what has been done is creating a mapping between the MBUN and the real userid and the choice has been given the citizen to have as many MBUN as he wishes to deal with the government.

Serious concerns should apply to too simplistic solutions ;-) Now for all /. MS bashers to enjoy : Although a qualified partner in the project, none of MS products where used to implement the solution. Given the money and the visibility at stakes, this caused a commotion in Canada with MS canadian VP putting pressure on everybody to reverse the decision.

Hey Sam, your products are just too simplistic and too proprietary. Phone us next year please ;-) That was really funny, the guy just couldn't understand that Macdonald's like marketing techniques did not work in this case. I mean, they even flew us for a week to Redmond at the campus to try to brainwash us, but still no go for MS.

-ls

OpenID

[AceJohnny (253840)]

and how this compare to OpenID [wikipedia.org] ? (See also OpenID Enabled [openidenabled.com] for those interested in using it)

Re:

[shish (588640)]

From a brief look, it seems considerably easier to implement and run; for clients, servers, and end users. I've had OpenID support on my webapp to-do list for months, and I'm considering implementing this in an afternoon. However, the fundemental design is worse :-/

OpenID could really do with a for-dummies API...

Re:

[4thAce (456825)]

I hope that it could be one of the supported URL-based identity protocols under Yadis [yadis.org] too.

Rich

System Requirements

[iovar (998724)]

From: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?Fa milyId=8BA187E5-3630-437D-AFDF-59AB699A483D&displa ylang=en [microsoft.com]

Supported Operating Systems: Linux; Windows Vista; Windows XP

How's the wheather in hell these days?

Why?

[PietjeJantje (917584)]

Why on earth would I want to, of all things, authenticate using a 3rd party propriety system from a vendor with proven business practices like MS? That seems like the very last thing I want to do. And I haven't even mentioned the outages, so your uptime depends on MS. What are you gonna do when that happens, call them? I have a much better idea, Bill. Why don't you use my unified login system. I've made a version in Visual Basic especially for you.

Terms of Use

[giafly (926567)]

Ever intending to compete against a Microsoft product?

you may not: use the service in a way that harms us or our affiliates, resellers, distributors, and/or vendors (collectively, the "Microsoft parties"), or any customer of a Microsoft party ...

Care about money?

We may choose in the future to charge for use of the service. If we choose to establish fees and payment terms for such use, Microsoft will provide at least one (1) month advance notice of such terms as provided in section 18 below, and you may elect to stop using the service rather than incurring fees.

https://msm.live.com/app/tou.aspx [live.com]

The concept never convinced me

[mrjb (547783)]

The 'one password for everything' concept is fundamentally broken. It is like having one key for everything you own- your house, your car. During a vacation, I *want* to be able to give the housekeeper access to my house, but I also want to *prevent* her from going for a joyride in my brand new expensive car. The fact that I have neither a housekeeper nor a brand new expensive car is a minor detail.

MS ignores Python style guide

[abecede (1097981)]

It is just sad to read the Python implementation of this functionality. Almost nothing is written according to the Python Style Guide [python.org]. Weird "__foo"-variables can be found, then it's not Python2.3 compliant because of ONE silly "staticmethod", many "getters" and "setters" which are just useless in this script. If MS wants to show their code to the scripting community, they should at least make it pretty and according to the language's coding standards. But maybe that is their understanding of "pretty". Who knows.

Re:So what?

[pembo13 (770295)]

They changed the name

Re:So what?

[kimvette (919543)]

Like the diebold voting booths? ;)