xmldap as a plugin to perpetual motion

Kevin Miller's new Firefox plugin wraps the native Windows CardSpace identity selector, and in the process provides a great card parsing implementation. Since Kevin was kind enough to implement a plugin framework, I figured I'd take advantage and added plugin support to the xmldap selector.

If you pick up the latest version of the plugin (requires Java 1.5 on your system) you will now find a new Identity Selector option in your preferences. If you have both Kevin and my extension installed, and you're on Windows, you can now flip back and forth between the CardSpace selector, and the xmldap selector at will.




The great news is that people implementing selectors will no longer need to worry about augmenting the browser. Now hopefully we can all quickly agree on a preferences structure to allow any implementation to easily add itself to the list.

If you're interested in writing you're own plugin, it's pretty simple...here's the basics of an XPCOM component that implements the plugin interface:

http://openinfocard.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/firefox/components/Identityselector.js

have fun!

Another Firefox Cardspace Extension

Check out this cool extension for Firefox by Kevin Miller

http://www.perpetual-motion.com/

It basically wraps the native CardSpace implementation on Windows so you can use it from Firefox. Very robust looking parsing card detection, and the ability to implement an XPCOM interface to plugin other selectors:

IIdentitySelector..GetBrowserToken(issuer , recipientURL, requiredClaims ,data.optionalClaims , tokenType, privacyPolicy, privacyPolicyVersion , serverCert );

The selector implementation can be determined by the user's preferences, so it should be very simple to adapt the xmldap selector or other cross platform implementations to this model and let user's choose their selector.

Nice work Kevin!

Combining CardSpace and OpenID

At IIW I demo'd a little proof-of-concept showing the ability to login to a CardSpace relying-party, using an OpenID based identity. For those who didn't get a chance to see it, I provided a little screen cast here:

Minor Bug Fixes

I updated the Firefox Selector to fix a few minor bugs introduced in the Managed Cards support update.

Thanks to Axel and to Antoine Galland from Gemalto for trying it out and reporting the bugs.

http://xmldap.org

Managed Card Support for Firefox

One more important update for the Firefox selector - With this new release, I've added a simple proof-of-concept around Managed Cards.

The Firefox selector now supports importing managed cards, and retrieving tokens from an STS. It only has support for Username/Password authentication over the simple TransportBinding (this means transport security rather than message level security) Also, I've only tested against the xmldap.org STS...it may work against other implementations, but I haven't yet focused on interop.

That being said, this now demonstrates a complete end-to-end exchange without any Microsoft components. An opensource STS issuing a token to an opensource Relying Party, via an opensource selector...all on a Mac.

Here's a screencast of how it works:



As always, the selector and source are available at http://xmldap.org

Firefox Plugin Updated

Thanks to the hard work of Axel Nennker and his friends, I've posted an update to the Firefox Selector. The selector now has these great features:

1) Support for Firefox 2.0 - the plugin should now work on 1.5+ and 2.0

2) Internationalization Support - Axel added i18n, and has localized to:

• English
• German
• French
• Norwegian
• Swedish
• Turkish
• Czech
• Arabic
• and Chinese

3) There's also initial support for Logotype certificates, so that a website's icon embedded in a certificate can be displayed to the user as part of the verification process



You can download the latest plugin at http://xmldap.org/

Thanks Axel!

Instructions for the CardSpace FirefFox Extention

It sounds like Craig Burton has been having trouble with the demo Cardspace Selector I put together for Firefox. I'm not sure what trouble he's been having, but I thought I'd toss up some quick instructions, and a screen cast.

Step 1) Make sure you're on Firefox 1.5 or greater.

Step 2) Make sure you've got J2SE 1.4x installed on your machine. The xmldap selector doesn't use any .net or Microsoft code...its a cross platform implementation written from scratch in Java. You can hit http://java.sun.com if you need to download a JDK

Step 3) Go to http://xmldap.org and download the Firefox extension. You may need to allow the popup blocker to trust my site. Restart firefox.

Step 4) Go to a Cardspace enabled site like xmldap, identityblog, or ping

Step 5) Click to login, create a card, and submit.

Note that you'll still get a warning saying: "Additional plugins are required to display all the media on this page" Ignore it...I haven't figured out how to make it go away yet. Please email me or comment if you know!

Here's a screencast demoing what you should see.

Craig and others - email me at cmort at xmldap.org if you have questions or issues!

Identity Selector for Safari

My good friend Ian Brown has taken the xmldap.org code and created an Identity Selector for Safari. It even integrates with the Apple Address Book for self-asserted cards. If you've got a Mac, check it out...if not, he's got a screen-cast.

Nice work Ian!

Firefox Identity Selector

I've just posted a prototype identity selector for firefox, which allows you to login to infocard enabled sites, without infocard, or even windows.

You can download it here: http://xmldap.org/xmldap.xpi

In order to get started, download and install the extension, and then browse over to one of the public relying parties. It also requires that you have a JVM installed, which you can pick up from java.com if need be.

Please note that this is of alpha quality. It only supports Self Asserted tokens, and many other desireable features have not been implemented. However, it should provide the based for some interesting discussions at IIW this week.

Enjoy, and please send feedback.

[Update: There seems to be a small bug with selecting cards. If you click on a card to select it, and its values do not fill in on the right side of the screen, then click it again until they do. If you attempt to submit with blank values it won't work]

[Update: Also - keep in mind that I haven't figured out how to make the Firefox warning that a plugin to handle the infocard object isn't installed. Simply ignore this, and please send me a note if you know how to make this go away]