dedis / Dissent

Provably Anonymous Overlay
http://dedis.cs.yale.edu/2010/anon/
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Terminology #12

Open kidehen opened 10 years ago

kidehen commented 10 years ago

As is always the case with technology architecture, terminology is crucial. I note you mention "- src/Identity - Containers for user information" which implies that Identity is a container. I find that confusing.

The items in the quest of Identity management boil down to the following, as far as I know:

  1. Identity -- associated with a nebulous entity.
  2. Identifier -- used to denote (signify, name, or "refer to") an erstwhile nebulous entity.
  3. Identity Card -- a document comprised of claims that facilitate Identification of the erstwhile nebulous entity, by way of attribute=value statements that coalesce around an identifier that denotes an entity.
  4. Authentication -- use of a protocol to verify the claims in an Identity Card i.e., an Identification mechanism
  5. Trust -- what you can build around verifiable Identity.

This project looks very interesting, so let's try to get the terminology clean from the onset as this will ultimately aid comprehension and appreciation of this endeavor.

davidiw commented 10 years ago

Identity is the namespace containing the different bits of an Identity. One could argue the fields within the Identity classes are Identifiers, but our implementation doesn't define an abstract name for these fields. I suspect much of what you're stating would make more sense from a UI perspective. Please take a closer look at the code and let me know what you think.