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ralphm's blog

Tuesday, 26 July 2005

Passel and Mimír

Rip, Mix, lather, rinse, repeat...

As offline offlinedizzyd wrote last week, Passel is now in the open. Passel is technology for building identity systems in a Rip and Mix kind of way. The idea is that you aggregate pieces of your identity. Some of these pieces can be provably verified by a third party (like your e-mail address or Jabber ID), others pieces self-asserted. Then, you combine these pieces of identity into an identity document that can be used to authenticate and register with online services. It is a work in progress, and not everything is set in concrete yet, but there is a nice whitepaper and the beginning of a codebase. You can read more on the project website (including wiki and blog) and dizzyd's personal blog.

I've been hovering on the sidelines of Passel for a few months now, seeing what's going on. From just before the launch, I've been working with dizzyd, offline offlinestpeter and jer to clear up bits in the documentation and code. I also wrote code for a Passel Target, a service you sent an identity document to in order to authenticate. The first Target being Mimír. I did most of the work over the weekend, and it appears to be working, as you can see in the inset.

I believe Passel has a lot of potential, most of which has yet to be unfolded. If you start reading about Passel, don't look at the limitations you think are there, but the concept behind: Ripping and Mixing of your identity. Reading dizzyd's Tao of Passel might help.