"user authorization" entries

Adrian Gropper co-authored this post.

After a short period of excitement and rosy prospects in the movement we’ve come to call the Internet of Things (IoT), designers are coming to realize that it will survive or implode around the twin issues of security and user control: a few electrical failures could scare people away for decades, while a nagging sense that someone is exploiting our data without our consent could sour our enthusiasm. Early indicators already point to a heightened level of scrutiny — Senator Ed Markey’s office, for example, recently put the automobile industry under the microscope for computer and network security.

In this context, what can the IoT draw from well-established technologies in federated trust? Federated trust in technologies as diverse as the Kerberos and SAML has allowed large groups of users to collaborate securely, never having to share passwords with people they don’t trust. OpenID was probably the first truly mass-market application of federated trust.

OpenID and OAuth, which have proven their value on the Web, have an equally vital role in the exchange of data in health care. This task — often cast as the interoperability of electronic health records — can reasonably be described as the primary challenge facing the health care industry today, at least in the IT space. Reformers across the health care industry (and even Congress) have pressured the federal government to make data exchange the top priority, and the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology has declared it the centerpiece of upcoming regulations. Read more…