Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...
's now-canceled client software for the Identity Metasystem. CardSpace is an instance of a class of identity client software called an Identity Selector. CardSpace stores references to users' digital identities
Digital identity
Digital identity is the aspect of digital technology that is concerned with the mediation of people's experience of their own identity and the identity of other people and things...
Information Cards are personal digital identities that people can use online, and the key component of Identity metasystems. Visually, each Information Card has a card-shaped picture and a card name associated with it that enable people to organize their digital identities and to easily select...
The user interface, in the industrial design field of human–machine interaction, is the space where interaction between humans and machines occurs. The goal of interaction between a human and a machine at the user interface is effective operation and control of the machine, and feedback from the...
designed to help people to easily and securely use these identities in applications and web sites where they are accepted. Resistance to phishing
Phishing
Phishing is a way of attempting to acquire information such as usernames, passwords, and credit card details by masquerading as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication. Communications purporting to be from popular social web sites, auction sites, online payment processors or IT...
Kim Cameron is a computer scientist who is currently Microsoft's Chief Architect of Access. He is the originator of the 7 Laws of Identity, and developed the InfoCard architecture....
Information Cards are personal digital identities that people can use online, and the key component of Identity metasystems. Visually, each Information Card has a card-shaped picture and a card name associated with it that enable people to organize their digital identities and to easily select...
-enabled application or website wishes to obtain information about the user
User (computing)
A user is an agent, either a human agent or software agent, who uses a computer or network service. A user often has a user account and is identified by a username , screen name , nickname , or handle, which is derived from the identical Citizen's Band radio term.Users are...
, the application or website requests a particular set of claims from the user. The CardSpace UI then appears, switching the display to the CardSpace service, which displays the user's stored identities as visual Information Card
Information Card
Information Cards are personal digital identities that people can use online, and the key component of Identity metasystems. Visually, each Information Card has a card-shaped picture and a card name associated with it that enable people to organize their digital identities and to easily select...
s. The user selects the InfoCard to use and the CardSpace software contacts the issuer of the identity to obtain a digitally signed
Digital signature
A digital signature or digital signature scheme is a mathematical scheme for demonstrating the authenticity of a digital message or document. A valid digital signature gives a recipient reason to believe that the message was created by a known sender, and that it was not altered in transit...
Extensible Markup Language is a set of rules for encoding documents in machine-readable form. It is defined in the XML 1.0 Specification produced by the W3C, and several other related specifications, all gratis open standards....
token that contains the requested information. CardSpace also allows users to create personal (also known as self-issued) Information Cards, which can contain one or more of 14 fields of identity information such as full name, address, etc. Other transactions may require a managed InfoCard; these are issued by a third party identity provider that makes the claims on the person's behalf, such as a bank, employer, or a government agency.
Extensible Markup Language is a set of rules for encoding documents in machine-readable form. It is defined in the XML 1.0 Specification produced by the W3C, and several other related specifications, all gratis open standards....
WS-Security is a flexible and feature-rich extension to SOAP to apply security to web services. It is a member of the WS-* family of web service specifications and was published by OASIS....
WS-Trust is a WS-* specification and OASIS standard that provides extensions to WS-Security, specifically dealing with the issuing, renewing, and validating of security tokens, as well as with ways to establish, assess the presence of, and broker trust relationships between participants in a secure...
WS-MetaDataExchange is a Web Services protocol specification, published by BEA Systems, IBM, Microsoft, and SAP. WS-MetaDataExchange is part of theWS-Federation roadmap; and is designed to work in conjunction with WS-Addressing, WSDL and WS-Policy to allow retrieval of metadataabout a Web...
is a WS* specification, created by IBM and 12 co-authors, that has become an OASIS standard as of version 1.2. It extends the fundamental security protocols specified by the WS-Security, WS-Trust and WS-SecureConversation by offering mechanisms to represent the capabilities and requirements of web...
. This means that any technology or platform that supports WS-* protocols can integrate with CardSpace. In order to accept Information Cards, a website developer simply needs to declare an HTML
HTML
HyperText Markup Language is the predominant markup language for web pages. HTML elements are the basic building-blocks of webpages....
