New Improved OpenID

OpenID is getting simple and safer to use by the day.

Last week MyOpenID added a pair of new features to combat ‘phishing’. That’s the trick familiar from those shady emails purporting to be from your bank which ask you to ‘confirm your account details’ on a site that looks just like your usual login page. OpenID is particularly vulnerable to phishing, since it works by taking you away from the site you’re on in order to sign in, which means that folk will get used to quickly entering their details and clicking the ‘Allow’ button without paying close attention to the URL in the address bar.

Now Simon Willison has launched a new service called idproxy.net, which lets you set up an OpenID identity based on your existing Yahoo! account and also includes a fairly strong layer of features to guard against phishermen, on top of Yahoo!’s existing protection.

Nice work. The usefulness of OpenID from a user’s point of view rests on the fact that it potentially frees you from the hassles of mainting squillions¹ of accounts for all the different sites you use, but achieves this by… asking you to set up yet another bloody account.

Sorry to keep banging on about this—I’m just rather taken with the speed at which folk involved with OpenID seem to go from raising concerns to suggesting solutions and implementing them.

1. I just checked in the application I use to store my passwords, and I have 87 different accounts on the web. Skimming the list, I reckon about two thirds of these could safely be replaced by my OpenID.↩

Posted at 11am on 28/01/07 by Jack Mottram to the web category.
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Tags: openid, web