| ABFAB | R. Smith |
| Internet-Draft | Cardiff University |
| Intended status: Informational | July 09, 2012 |
| Expires: January 08, 2013 |
Application Bridging for Federated Access Beyond web (ABFAB) Usability and User Interface Considerations
draft-smith-abfab-usability-ui-considerations-02
The use of ABFAB-based technologies requires that each user's device is configured with the user's identities that they wish to use in ABFAB transactions. This will require something on that device, either built into the operating system or a standalone utility, that will manage the user's identities and identity to service mappings. Anyone designing that "something" will face the same set of challenges. This document aims to document these challenges with the aim of producing well-thought out UIs with some degree of consistency.
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The use of ABFAB-based technologies requires that a user's device is configured with their identities that they wish to use in ABFAB transactions. Achieving this will require something on that device, either built into the operating system or a standalone utility, that will manage the user's identities and identity to service mappings. Anyone designing that "something" will face the same set of challenges. This document aims to document these challenges with the aim of producing well-thought out UIs with some degree of consistency.
The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in [RFC2119].
Various items of terminology used in the document are heavily overloaded and thus could mean a variety of different things to different people. In an attempt to minimise this problem, this section gives a brief description of the main items of terminology used in order to aid with a consistent understanding of this document.
When using the ABFAB architecture to perform federated authentication to some service, when a user attempts to authenticate to an ABFAB secured application they will need to provide identity information that they wish to authenticate to that particular service with. This will happen through a process of the application calling the GSS-API, which will in turn gather the users credentials through whatever mechanism it has been configured to do so. We will call this mechanism the "identity selector" in this document, though note that this is not a recommendation on terminology for the mechanism!
The simplest way to achieve the desired effect would be a mechanism that simply takes the credentials from the currently logged in user (e.g. the Windows Domain Credentials) and uses those for all services that request authenticate through ABFAB. This approach gives ultimate simplicity in terms of UI - i.e. it wouldn't have one - but the least flexibility. If there is ever to be a requirement for a user to user a different set of credentials for a service, then something more complex will be needed.
Where there is a requirement for multiple credentials to be supported, there are of course two methods that could be employed to configure identities and associated information:
When designing an identity selector with a UI (or indeed, with a headless mode), any implementor will share a common set of usability considerations inherent to the context. This document aims to explore these considerations, and provide advice and guidance on addressing them where possible.
Anyone designing an identity selector will have to grapple with choosing terminology that the average user has some chance of understanding. This terminology can split into a few main functional areas, as discussed next.
The first area where terminology is needed is around the identity/identities of the user. Users are typically used to seeing a variety of terms for aspects of their identity in the federated sense, and an even larger variety in the wider internet sense. For example, in the federated sense some of these terms include "username", "login", "network account", "institutional account", "home organisation account", "credentials", and a myriad of other such terms. However, NAI - the technically correct name for their identity in an ABFAB sense - is highly unlikely to be one of these terms that users are used to seeing.
Implementors of an identity selector will need to carefully consider their indended audience for both their level of technical capability and the existing terminology that they may have been exposed to.
Beyond terminology, careful thought needs to be given to the paradigm to use when presenting identity to users, as identities and services are abstract concepts that some users may not find is easily understandable. Implementors may wish to keep such abstract concepts, or may wish to examine attempts to map to real world paradigms, e.g. the idea of using "Identity Cards" that are held in the user's "Wallet", as used by Microsoft Cardspace.
Terminology around services is likely to be less of a problem than identity, but it will actually depend on what the service is. For example, each service could be simply described as "server", "system", etc. But for simplicity just the word "service" will probably suffice.
Depending on your perspective either each identity may be mapped to multiple services, or each service has multiple identities mapped to it. Thus any UI could present either perspective, or both.
One of the core features of an identity selector is the management of a user's identities. This section first looks at what information associated with an identity will need to managed, and then looks in detail at various usability considerations of this area.
There is firstly a minimal set of information that MUST be stored about each identity to allow ABFAB authentication to take place:
Next up is a small set of information that SHOULD be stored about each identity to allow the user to effectively select a particular identity:
Finally, there is a set of optional information that MAY be stored about each identity that represent useful information for the user to have. Note that this list is not intended to be exhaused; any implementor is free to add any more items to their identity selector that make sense in their implementation.
Users will have one or more identities given to them by organisations that they have a relationship with. One of the core tasks of an identity selector will be to learn about these identities in order to use them when it comes to authenticating to services on behalf of the user. Adding these identities could be done in one of three ways: manual addition, automated addition that is manually triggered, or automated addition that is automatically triggered. Each of these are discussed in more detail next.
Note that the term "association" or "addition" of an identity is used rather than "provisioning" of an identity, because while we actually are provisioning identities into the UI, provisioning is an overloaded term in the identity and access management space and could easily be confused with identity provisioning in the sense of the creation of the identity by the home organisation's identity management procedures.
Allowing users to manually add an identity is technically the easiest method to , but it is a method that has the greatest usability drawbacks. Most of the information required is relatively technical and finding some way of explaining what each field is to an untechnical audience is challenging (to say the least). This especially is the case for trust anchor information. Thus this method should be considered as a power-user option only, or as a fall-back should the other methods not be applicable.
When this method is used, careful consideration should be given to the UI presented to the user. The UI will have to ask for all of the information detailed in Section 6.1.
There are two points at which a user could manually add an identity:
Of course, implementors could support both styles of identity addition to gain the benefits of both and give flexibility to the user.
TODO: Something about choosing an appropriate trust anchor and verifying your IdP...
One way to bypass the need for manual addition of a user's identity - and all of the usability issues inherent with that approach - is to provide some sort of manually triggered, but automated, provisioning process.
One approach to accomplishing this, for example, could be for an organisation to have a section on their website where their users could visit, enter the user part of their NAI, and be given piece of provisioning data that contains much or all of the relevant identity information for importing into the identity selector.
It is reasonable to assume that any such provisioning service is likely to be organisation specific, so that the Issuing Organisation and realm part of the NAI will be constant, as would be the trust anchor information. The user part of their NAI will have been input on the web service. The password could be provided as a part of the provisioning file or the identity selector could prompt the user to enter it.
Additionally, the user SHOULD be given the opportunity to:
In this case, trust anchors could be directly provided through the provisioning mechanism to help establish the trust relationship in a secure manner.
Many organisations manage the machines of their users using enterprise management tools. Such organisations may wish to be able to automatically add a particular user's identity to the identity selector on their machine/network account so that the user has to do nothing.
This represents the best usability for the user - who wouldn't actually have to do anything. However, it can only work on machines centrally managed by the organisation.
Additionally, having an identity automatically provided, including its password, does have some particular usability issues. Users are used to having to provide their username and password to access services. When attempting to access services, authenticating to them completely transparently to the user could represent a source of confusion. User training within an organisation to explain that automated provisioning of their identity has been enabled is the only way to counter this.
This process is conceptually fairly similar to adding an identity, and thus shares many of the usability issues with that process. Some particular things are discussed here.
An identity selector may allow a user to manually modify some or all of the information associated with each identity. The obvious item that MUST be allowed to be changed by the user is the password associated with the identity.
To ease usability, organisations may wish to automatically provide updates to identity information. For example, if the user's password changes, it could automatically update the password for the identity in the user's identity selector.
An inherent by-product of the ABFAB architecture is that an identity cannot be verified during the addition process; it can only be verified while it is in use with a real service. This represents a definite usability issue no matter which method of identity addition is used (see Section 6.2):
Also, if the identity information is incorrect the user may not know where the error lies, and the error messages provided by the mechanism may not be helpful enough to indicate the error and how to fix it (see Section 8).
This is fairly similar to adding or modifying an identity, and thus shares many of the usability issues with those processes. Some particular things are discussed here.
Allowing the user to manually delete an identity is probably the best way to achieve the goal. Any UI should allow for this option.
While automated removal of an identity is a way of achieving the goal without having to interact with the user, the consequence is that things may disappear from the user's identity selector without them realising.
A service to identity mapping tell the identity selector which identity should be used for a particular service. There is potentially a many-to-many association between identities and services since a user may wish to use one of their identities for many services, or more than one identity for a single service (e.g. if they have multiple roles on that service).
This potentially complex many-to-many association between is not easily comprehended by the user, and allowing the user to both manipulate it and control can be challenging. These obstacles are especially common when errors occur after an association has been made. In this scenario it is important to make it easy for the user to disassociate the Identity from the service.
A service listing should be considered in the identity selector which is both searchable and editable by the user.
It would be beneficial if, when using a service, the identity currently in use could be made visible to the user while he/she is using a specific service. This allows the user to identify which the identity is used with a particular service at a particular time (the user may have more than one identity that they could use with a particular service) - so that they can then disassociate the pairing.
There needs to be a way for the user to create the service to identity association. however this should only occur once the identity has authenticated with the service without any error.
There are a few ways this association could happen.
The user could manually associate a particular service with a particular identity. In order to do so, however, the user would need to know all of the technical details of that service before hand, such as its realm and all other required information.
It would be benefical from a usability perspective to minimise - or avoid entirely - situations where the user has to pick an identity for a particular service. This could be accomplished by having rules to describe services and their mapping to identities. Such a rule could match, for example, a particular identity for all IMAP servers, or a particular identity for all services in a given service realm. These rules could be configured as a part of the automated identity addition process described in Section 6.2.2 or Section 6.2.3
A user MUST be able to disassociate an identity with a service - that is, to be able to remove the mapping without having to remove the identity.
All GSS-API calls need to be instantiated from the application. For this reason when an error occurs the user needs to be sent back to the application to re-initiate the GSS-API call. This can get tedious and cause the user to opt out of what they are trying to accomplish. In addition to this the error messages themselves may not be useful enough for the user to decipher what has gone wrong.
It is important to try and avoid error cases all together while using GSS-API as error messages and error handling can really effect usability. Another solution would be to alter the application to handle the errors as it is instantiating the GSS-API communication.
TODO: Lots more to discuss here...
TODO: e.g. wrong password, bad trust anchors, etc. TODO.
TODO: e.g. identity is correct but no authorisation. TODO.
TODO: e.g. network errors. TODO.
It is of course hoped that the identity selector will have to occasionally handle successes as well as errors. This section has some brief discussion about some areas you might want to think about.
The first time an identity is used with a service, it may or may not be a good idea (depending on the service) to visually indiciate in some way that the process has been successful, in order that the user understands what is happening and is then prepared for future authentication attempts.
On an on-going basis you may or may not wish to indiciate visually to the user a successful authentication to a service. This relates to Section 7.2.
The following individuals made important contributions to the text of this document: Sam Hartman (Painless Security LLC), and Maria Turk (Codethink Ltd).
TODO
TODO
This document does not require actions by IANA.
| [RFC2119] | Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119, March 1997. |
| [RFC4282] | Aboba, B., Beadles, M., Arkko, J. and P. Eronen, "The Network Access Identifier", RFC 4282, December 2005. |
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