In the previous post, I have shown that the Authentication Service can be made portable and that this is very important to prevent identity loss. One can prepare any number of XRD files and locate it anywhere he wants to make sure that his identity is not going to be lost on the net, as long as he can prove that XRD file is authentic.
How do we prove it?
One way to do it is to obtain the signature from the Identity Attestation Service (IAS). The job of the IAS is to verify that the user is the rightful owner of the identifier and sign the XRD document presented by him.
The resulting XRD may or may not have the user’s core identifier, but MUST include the permanent identifier as <Subject> . Of course, the user can self attest but that means he has to have his own cert/key-pair and in general, his ability of being uncorrelatable at the RPs are lost because he has to expose his public key.
So, the user now has a signed XRD. He can place it anywhere on the net. The trust is coming form the IAS, so if either the RP or Authentication Service do not trust the IAS, the flow breaks. In that case, the user should obtain a signed XRD from another IAS.