Windows CardSpace

This sample chapter from Understanding CardSpace (Addison-Wesley Professional) outlines some of the problems faced by authentication systems, and how Windows CardSpace has been designed from the ground up to solve these problems.

This one-pager describes how Microsoft's Windows CardSpace software and the "Identity Metasystem" protocols underlying it help solve the identity problems that Internet users face today.  CardSpace is Microsoft's contribution to filling this gap using technology all can adopt and solutions all can endorse, putting people in control of their identity interactions on the Internet.

Check out this step-by-step guide on best practices for supporting Information Cards on Web sites. Learn about two different deployment scenarios: sites exclusively using Information Cards for authentication, and mixed-mode sites allowing the use of either passwords or Information Cards.

This icon is intended to provide a common visual cue that Information Cards can be used to provide information to a site or program, similarly to how the RSS icon is used to indicate the availability of syndicated content. It is intended for use by all.

Windows CardSpace replaces traditional username/password authentication with a tool that helps users better manage their digital identities and helps shield users from various forms of identity attack such as phishing. Michèle Leroux Bustamante explains.

This article introduces the set of new Windows capabilities called Windows CardSpace, which provides a standards-based solution for working with and managing diverse digital identities.

Windows CardSpace wraps up the who of who you are while keeping your private information private. It may well revolutionize business on the Web.

Ever wonder what Windows CardSpace is all about? Nigel Watling (Technical Evangelist) and Andy Harjanto (Program Manager) explain it in this Channel 9 video with a lot of time spent on the whiteboard.

Step by step instruction on how to add Windows CardSpace to your website, how to issue your own managed cards, how to build web services that authenticate users with Windows CardSpace and how to decrypt security tokens.

This document is a normative description of the Identity Selector Interoperability Profile.  Implementations using these specifications allow people to manage their digital identities with Identity Selectors that represent these identities as Information Cards.  Each card has an associated Identity Provider and can be selected by people for use at Relying Parties where they are accepted. [ XPS Version]

Learn how digital identities represented by Information Cards can be integrated into a user-centric identity framework, based on the concept of an Identity Metasystem, enabling interoperable Identity Selectors, Identity Providers, and Relying Parties, all with the user in control. [ XPS Version]

Learn about the web interfaces used to enable the use of Information Cards and Identity Selectors by interoperable web applications and browsers. [ XPS Version]