General Musing

I was trying to think about what to say about SlideShare, so I was browsing the site to give me inspiration, it didn’t work.

What I did find was Clipperz, Clipperz makes it possible to login with one click. The username and password for the site is stored encrypted at Clipperz and is decrypted and posted to the site. I’ll use the example of /., the bookmarklet provided extracts the form and uses that to populate the login form.

{
  "page": {"title": "Slashdot: News for nerds, stuff that matters"},
  "form": {
    "attributes": {"action": "http://slashdot.org/login.pl", "method": "post"},
    "inputs":[
      {"type": "text",     "name": "unickname",   "value": "username"},
      {"type": "hidden",   "name": "returnto",    "value": "//slashdot.org/"},
      {"type": "hidden",   "name": "op", "value": "userlogin"},
      {"type": "password", "name": "upasswd",     "value": "password"},
      {"type": "checkbox", "name": "login_temp",  "value": "yes"},
      {"type": "submit",   "name": "userlogin",   "value": "Log in"}]
    },
  "version": "0.2.3"
}

To be entirely portable you can access the websites from a sidebar in your browser. Naturally this is a nice proof of concept for the real product they are selling: zero-knowledge web applications.

Zero-knowledge web applications is about making web applications more secure. Do you trust Google Documents with your confidential documents? You shouldn’t unless the data is stored without the knowledge of the SaaS provider. Clipperz password manager is the first zero-knowledge web application. This means that Clipperz knows nothing about its users and their data. They do this using a JavaScript library, based on Ajax and browser-based cryptography, which can be used to build applications that users can can use to manage their private data.

technorati tags: saas, business, javascript, security, authentication, identity

Tags: authentication, business, identity, javascript, saas, security

This entry was posted on July 26, 2008 at 8:07 pm and is filed under algorithm, business, identity, pki, security, web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.