I&AM: Understanding Geneva

At PDC last week, the "Geneva" platform for federated claims-based identity and access management (I&AM) was announced. Here are some useful resources to get started:

• Identity Roadmap for Software + Services: video with Kim Cameron and Vittorio Bertocci
• Project Geneva part 1, part 2, part 3: Kim provides details about the roadmap
• Identity @ PDC08 HOL, samples, demos, tools: Vittorio provides useful Geneva resources
• Microsoft's New Identity Landscape: Vittorio explains all the Geneva features and modules

Don't let the federation part of this stop you from looking at Geneva, it is utilizing claims for access management and access control you should focus on initially, externalizing it to the identity metasystem. Let the support for distributed I&AM across the extended enterprise be a nice feature that you get for free.

WCF: Security Architecture and Claims

At my WCF talk at NNUG last night, I didn't have the time to go into the security architecture of WCF in general or into identity model details such as STS, tokens, policies and claims.

To get an overview of these aspects, I recommend reading "The holy grail of Enterprise SOA security" by Matias Woloski.

To learn more about how to actually build an authorization system based on claims, you should read "Building a Claims-Based Security Model in WCF" part 1 and part 2 by Michele Leroux Bustamente.

[UPDATE] Read the Digital Identity for .NET Applications whitepaper by David Chappell to get a good overview of the involved technology.