Re: Openbadges and Mozilla Persona

Fabio, interesting question

One point to clarify about Open Badges is that the open spec is not tied to
Mozilla Persona login. The Mozilla-hosted "Backpack" software that is
currently in a sort of central position in the ecosystem does currently
rely on Persona for login, but it is really up to a "consumer" of a badge
to trust that the person in front of you corresponds to the email address
recognized by the badge. The role Persona played in the Backpack was to
outsource the authentication of the logged in user as representing the
email address identifier in their badges. This is a general problem though,
not something that can only be solved by Persona.

Persona will be end-of-lifed, because it never got the distributed user
agent adoption that was initially designed for it. It was intended to be
built into browsers so that persona.org would not be a centralized
component of the system, but that never happened, so the whole login system
remained dependent on this centralized component that soon may disappear.
To protect against this disappearance, Mozilla Backpack accounts will be
migrated to an internal login system that serves the same function
(verifying email addresses for logins).

In the Badge Alliance, we are kicking off a round of discussion on
identifiers for badges as we ramp up to a 2.0 spec release to be compatible
with the proposed work in the Web Payment IG's Verifiable Claims Task Force.

Stay tuned for Mozilla and Badge Alliance announcements on Persona, the
Backpack, and 2016 plans in the coming week.

Nate
Badge Alliance

On Sat, Jan 2, 2016 at 12:54 PM, Asbjørn Ulsberg <asbjorn@ulsberg.no> wrote:

> 2016-01-01 1:29 GMT+03:00 Fabio Barone <holon.earth@gmail.com>:
>
> > According to the site, Openbadges uses Mozilla Persona.
> > I think to remember that Mozilla Persona has been heavily discussed in
> this
> > group, and I also think to remember that there were some rumors
> circulating
> > of a possible demise.
>
> I don't know much about the subject, but Manu Sporny has written quite
> extensively about it:
>
> http://manu.sporny.org/2015/credentials-retrospective/
>
> --
> Asbjørn Ulsberg           -=|=-        asbjorn@ulsberg.no
> «He's a loathsome offensive brute, yet I can't look away»
>
>