RelMeAuth

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Revision as of 23:39, 22 April 2010 by Tantek (talk | contribs) (→‎detailed algorithm: clarify same-site rel-me details)
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RelMeAuth is a proposed open standard for using rel-me links to profiles on OAuth supporting services to authenticate via either those profiles or your own site.

support RelMeAuth

independents

In general, all you have to do is just use rel="me" on your personal site, and enter your personal site as your URL on other sites.

That's it! No odd new hidden meta tags or invisible XML side-files.

Slightly longer explanation:

1. Add rel="me" links to your other profiles.

The simple and common case:

Add rel="me" to links from your home page to your various profiles on other services.

If you prefer to have a separate contact page that links to your other profiles, then

  1. add rel="me" to links from your contact page to those other profiles
  2. add rel="me" to the link from your home page to your contact page

2. Edit your other profiles to link back to your site.

Edit your other profiles and set their "home page" or "personal site" or "URL" field to your personal site.

Here's a list of profile sites that have URL fields and support rel-me.

3. There is no step 3. You're done.

examples in the wild

simple home page

Tantek's home page http://tantek.com/ has (simplified markup) 

<ul>
<li><a rel="me" href="http://twitter.com/t">Twitter: @t</a></li>
<li><a rel="me" href="http://identi.ca/t">identi.ca: t</a></li>
</ul>
separate contact page

Jeremy Keith's home page http://adactio.com/ has (simplified markup) 

<ul>
<li><a rel="me" href="/journal/">Journal</a></li>
<li><a rel="me" href="/contact/">Contact</a></li>
</ul>

and then also:

http://adactio.com/journal/ has (simplified markup) 

<ul>
<li><a rel="me" href="http://huffduffer.com/adactio/">Huffduffer</a></li>
<li><a rel="me" href="http://twitter.com/adactio/">Twitter</a></li>
<li><a rel="me" href="http://adactio.tumblr.com/">Tumblr</a></li>
<li><a rel="me" href="http://www.last.fm/user/adactio/">Last.fm</a></li>
<li><a rel="me" href="http://www.dopplr.com/traveller/adactio/public">Dopplr</a></li>
<li><a rel="me" href="http://www.vimeo.com/user196031">Vimeo</a></li>
<li><a rel="me" href="http://ffffound.com/home/adactio/found/">Ffffound</a></li>
<li><a rel="me" href="http://readernaut.com/adactio">Readernaut</a></li>
<li><a rel="me" href="http://97bottles.com/people/adactio/">97 Bottles</a></li>
</ul>

authentication preference

If you have a specific preference for what service(s) to authenticate with, just make sure that you list links to your profiles on those other services in preference order (on your home page or contact page as described above).

profile sites

Any social network site or similar site that has user profile pages should:

  1. provide a user interface for a user to enter and publicly publish a URL back to their home page
  2. publish a visible link with rel="me" from user's profile page to their personal home page

Most sites already do this.

authentication sites

Any site that wants to allow users to login with their credentials from that site on 3rd party sites should:

  1. Support OAuth (2.0 even)
  2. Follow Twitter's conventions for:
    • endpoint paths and other protocol details
    • mimic Twitter's user interface for authentication flow (on both desktop and mobile - they've done a great job)

Sites that support both rel-me and are also OAuth end points:

sites needing a user login

Any site that wants to let users login with an identity should:

  1. provide a user interface for users to enter or choose their preferred online identity (e.g. their own URL)
  2. perform RelMeAuth authentication as described below


how it works

summary algorithm

Summary of the RelMeAuth authentication algorithm

  • input: a user identity (e.g. URL) to authenticate
  • output: success or cancel authentication or no authenticatable URLs found
  1. start with a user identity URL (e.g from the UI, or from a cookie from previous login etc.)
  2. iterate through their outbound rel-me links on that URL
    1. if
      1. a rel-me destination is up (HTTP Get succeeded, following any redirects)
      2. and rel-me links back to user's site
      3. and has OAuth endpoint
      4. then do OAuth authentication
      5. if authentication succeeded, you're done, the user has been been authenticated with the user identity URL, exit
      6. if it was rejected, the user canceled, thus cancel the entire authentication process, exit
    2. continue iteration with the next rel-me link if any
  3. no authenticatable URLs found (either none at all, or any provided had some other error, 404, no response, no OAuth endpoint, other OAuth error)

detailed algorithm

  • input: a user identity (e.g. URL) to authenticate
  • output: success or cancel authentication or no authenticatable URLs found
  1. start with a user identity URL (e.g from the UI, or from a cookie from previous login etc.)
  2. if the URL is an OAuth provider
  3. then try authenticating with it
    1. if it succeeds, exit
    2. if canceled, exit
    3. otherwise continue
  4. iterate through their outbound rel-me links on that URL (first through direct rel-me links to external sites in order, then iterate through URLs deeper into the personal site in order, e.g. to a contacts page, and iterate through rel-me links from there to external sites in order)
    1. if
      1. a rel-me destination is up (HTTP Get succeeded, following any redirects)
      2. and rel-me links back to user's site
      3. and has OAuth endpoint
      4. then do OAuth authentication
      5. if authentication succeeded, you're done, the user has been been authenticated with the user identity URL, exit
      6. if it was rejected, the user canceled, thus cancel the entire authentication process, exit
    2. continue iteration with the next rel-me link if any
  5. no authenticatable URLs found (either none at all, or any provided had some other error, 404, no response, no OAuth endpoint, other OAuth error)

open source implementations

There are a couple of open source libraries that sites can use to implement RelMeAuth so their users can login using their own identities.

Python

PHP

issues

  • How do you find the OAuth endpoint for any given user profile site/service? -Tantek
    • Use OAuth 2.0 discovery mechanism if supported
    • Use a whitelist of provider site to OAuth endpoint
    • Try the Twitter OAuth endpoint paths on other sites to see if they work - assuming that many OAuth providers will simply mimic Twitter's example as suggested.
  • How do you get an appID to use with any given site's OAuth? -Tantek
    • This appears to still be a manual process, per site, and thus a legitimate limitation of RelMeAuth in comparison to say OpenID.

history

On 2010-02-01 Tantek introduced the basis for and Jeff Lindsay suggested the name for RelMeAuth.

In a follow-up Tantek suggested the following simple protocol for RelMeAuth:

RelMeAuth works for any #OAuth + rel-me site, and enables auto-fallback with use of alternate identities for authentication:

  1. user enters their site URL
  2. iterate through their outbound rel-me links
  3. if
    1. a rel-me destination is up, and
    2. rel-me links back to user's site, and
    3. has OAuth endpoint,
    then do OAuth authentication.

Thus user links to their RelMeAuth profiles in preference order, and authentication code tries them in order. e.g. Twitter, Identi.ca, ... etc.

Later that evening Tantek, Jeff Lindsay, Paul Tarjan and others discussed RelMeAuth at the microformats dinner in Mountain View and afterwards Jeff and Paul implemented RelMeAuth in an open source Python library at Hacker Dojo and discussed/tested it in IRC.

http://krijnhoetmer.nl/irc-logs/microformats/20100203

Less than 24 hours from concept to open source implementation.

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