Cannibal Lobsters and Stolen Fingerprints - remembering Kim Cameron

I have been quite grief-struck today after learning that Kim Cameron died recently. To add to the many tributes to him, I want to post the original version of a column I wrote for PC Plus back in 2005 where I had entirely misread the commission which said 'not so much with the personal angle' and wrapped it around with personal details - because my memories of Kim are equal parts technical mastery and personal kindness and support...

PC PLUS Issue 238, Insider column

Cannibal lobsters and stolen fingerprints

Mary Branscombe puts a face to the name behind Microsoft’s identity plans

30-foot cannibal lobsters and digital identity don’t usually make it into the same conversation but that’s Kim Cameron for you. Cameron is Microsoft’s identity architect. He’s embarrassed to be called ‘a Microsoft official’. He won an award for knowing that technology has to work in the real world. He’s not afraid of lobsters – but he can’t cope with a single extra password.

           Phishing, as Cameron points out, has a 1,000% compound annual growth rate any business would give its eye teeth for. And as most people will tell you their password for a Starbucks voucher or a free pen, it’s past time to move to something more secure.

           Throwing technology at the problem isn’t enough if you can’t tell whether you’re reaching the real eBay site or a clever fake. You can tell when you’re walking into a high street bank, but spotting the online equivalent of a dark alley or the back of a truck is harder. The IE 7 anti-phishing toolbar can’t stop you installing something that sounds the same and turns out come from the phishers themselves. Windows Vista is going to include a replacement for usernames and passwords called InfoCard which uses Web services to compare what you say about yourself with what sites want to know.

           To make this more than just the next version of Passport, Cameron’s been designing an identity metasystem so you can exchange an InfoCard ID with a Web site that uses another kind of ID system. To help people trust it, he’s been thrashing out the seven laws of identity needed to ensure both privacy and security on his blog. 

           Exchanging long emails about InfoCard quickly turned into meeting up for coffee when he came to town for GCexpo (the big public sector IT show), along with Jerry Fishenden (Microsoft’s National Technology Officer and general thinker on IT strategy for government). Fishenden roundly criticized the ID card bill the day that MPs voted on it, checking off how many of the seven laws it breaks and pointing out that while you can always get a new driving licence if it gets stolen, if your biometrics are compromised the government isn’t going to be able give you a new set of fingerprints.

           Cameron has his own reasons for distrusting passwords and online security: he logged onto his bank account from an Internet café in an Italian hotel and it was only when money went missing that he remembered the camera pointing at the screen, recording his password.

           We met again at the Microsoft Professional Developer Conference in LA. Cameron was there with Don Schmidt, the senior program manager behind Active Directory Federation Services – debuting in Windows Server R2, this is the first step to integrating Active Directory identities with the identity metasystem.

           Over dinner Kim explained another reason he started working on the laws of identity. He came to Microsoft when they bought ZOOMIT, the company where he developed the metadirectory that became Microsoft Identity Integration Server. Metadirectories bring together information that used to be in separate systems. You can get at your email and the Lotus Notes discussions you’re involved in and the company databases you have access to without typing in a username and password three or four times. With a metadirectory, administrators can manage user information, provide access to disparate systems, manage workflow, audit who accesses what and when – and remove users when they leave the company without having to do the same thing in every separate system by hand.

           But anything that brings together all that information is a tempting target for hackers (one of the main criticisms of the ID Card plans is that they create the biggest honeypot you can imagine). And there are privacy issues even for legitimate users. Back at ZOOMIT, there was a metadirectory covering employees and a Web interface that turned the staff list into a set of Web pages. Kim thought everyone would want their own Web page with a photograph; he quickly found out that actually, while some people want to talk about who they are and what they do, there are just as many people who’d like to keep things more private.

           That’s why the very first law of identity says that your details only get revealed with your consent and the second law says ‘don’t hand out any more details than necessary’; because if users don’t trust it to keep things private when they want to, the identity metasystem will never succeed. 

           And that’s when the giant lobsters made an entrance. Confronted by the three, four and five pound lobsters on offer, Kim was reminded of fishing for lobsters in his youth, and watching a short made by the Canadian Film Board; they miked up some lobsters in a tank and filmed them doing what comes naturally - fighting and eating each other. Show that on a 30-foot cinema screen and you have terrifying monsters making horrible noises and floods of people fleeing in terror. Not so different from the government ID Card bill after all.