Linkey update w/c 18/02/2013

It’s been a long time since I last gave an update on Linkey so I’ll try to summarise what has happening recently.

In late Janaury, Chris Brown the manager for the Access and Identity Management (AIM) programme visited us here in Lincoln. We spent a few hours looking over the case study that I’ve been working on and Joss and I discussed how the work we’re doing on Linkey fits into the eco-system that LNCD have developed. A number of actions came out of the meeting:

  1. Get in touch with a number of contacts that Chris has at Kent and Newcastle to discuss a number of AIM related projects and what we can learn from them.
  2. Get in touch with contacts at Warwick University who have a number of APIs and tools that are secured with OAuth 1.0. If possible I would like to include their work in the case study.
  3. Speak to JISC InfoNet to see if a toolkit could be created out of the case study.

I’ve spent a few months trying to find an appropriate conference to go to so that I can engage with the AIM community and discuss the project and it’s outputs. After much searching for the right conference I’m happy to say that I’m going to be going to the 16th Internet Identity Workshop in Mountain View, California. Being in the heart of Silicon Valley I’m really looking forward to meeting developers and evangelists from companies such as Google, Facebook and Microsoft, all of whom are trying to be “our” online identity provider.

As part of my research for the case study I have been looking into the many use-cases of OAuth. Recently I’ve been experimenting with securing an RDF SPARQL server to only respond with triples that an access token (sent in a HTTP header) can access. I will blog about this later once I’ve got a bit further with it.

Since January I’ve been working on the OAuth code which has had some great contributions from some guys from the US. It is now finished and running in production in several places (more on this in another blog post). In addition, now that the code is complete I can start developing a plugin for the SAML bearer grant.

Finally, the Linkey project will officially finish on the 25th June.