On the Seattle-Paris flight. I've just posted the piece about validation-authentication-authorization , and i am a bit bothered by the fact that I was unable to delve into greater details for what concerns the authoriZation part. In particular, I'd like to address one of the misunderstandings which can derive from transporting verbatim the knowledge of Kerberos & "unattended" security in general to the world of user centered identity management. Some of you claimaniacs may find the stuff below pretty obvious: I do. But judging from some heated argument I had about this, it may turn out that it is not that obvious after all so it's worth to write it down. How often should your application ask for a token? It may seem a silly question, and you may be tempted to reply with the answer that my wife gets when she asks to her auntie how often she should turn the roast: "as often as needed". Not the most actionable answer, I'm sure you'll concur :-). As in good tradition, let's take few steps back and look at the bigger picture. When you sit at your workstation and log in your domain, if your local network uses kerberos you get your nice ticket granting ticket (TGT); from that moment on, every time you take a ride on your network carnival (access a share, a portal, a printer...) the network software takes care of using the TGT for getting a ticket for you, which is specialized for the resource you are accessing. Everything happens seamlessly, and the user is lulled in blissful ignorance
Read More...